Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Here's the first post, followed by my comments:

Find the original at http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2004/09/how-wings-of-butterfly-can-turn-proud.html

Sunday, September 12, 2004

HOW THE WINGS OF A BUTTERFLY CAN TURN PROUD TOWERS INTO A HOUSE OF CARDS: SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS AND PNM THEORY

The third anniversary of September 11 seems to be a fitting time to tackle the most far-reaching concept in The Pentagon's New Map, that of System Perturbations. In order to be as cogent as possible I'm dividing this post into two parts: first, what System Perturbation is according to Dr. Barnett and relevant historical examples; secondly, what are the strategic "Rules" of System Perturbations? How do we defend against them or mitigate their effects? When and why would we inflict System Perturbations on others?

PART I. THE ACHILLES HEEL OF GLOBALIZATION—CONNECTIVITY IS A VULNERABILITY AS WELL AS A STRENGTH

System Perturbations is an excellent example of a powerful concept of which modern society has long only been half-aware. Aspects of System Perturbations were foreshadowed by the ideas of many thinkers in diverse fields like John Maynard Keynes , Marshall McCluhan or General Billy Mitchell but no one fully grasped the strategic entirety until Dr. Barnett. In fact, if The Pentagon's New Map had been about nothing other than System Perturbations Dr. Barnett would have rendered a signal service to the National Security, Defense and Intelligence communities. The concept is really that important.

If you are habituated to thinking in terms of systemic wholes, like physicists and economists are trained to do, reading about System Perturbations will strike you as kind of a Homer Simpson "D'OH!" moment where you wonder why you didn't see that yourself. If, like most people, your daily work involves seeing and thinking in terms of trees rather that forests you may have to step back a bit and reorient yourself psychologically to a larger scale and longer time frame.

Here is "System Perturbations," 9-11 being a recent dramatic example, defined and explained by Dr. Barnett in PNM (p. 260-267—any notation by me is bracketed in regular text):

When the strikes unfolded on 9/11, I can remember thinking, This is it. This is what we've been thinking about all these years: a he warlike event occurring in peacetime, something so big that it forces us to rethink everything. It's the meteor that will separate the dinosaurs from the mammals in defense. It will tell us what we need to know about war within the context of everything else …

But cannibalizing agents [entities that creatively react and adapt to a crisis] do not become ascendant unless dramatically new rule sets are recognized as coming to the fore. When those new rule sets are recognized and given credence, we begin to understand the utility of defining system-level crises like 9/11 as something more than a gang of terrorists attacking three buildings in the United States. That "something more" is what I seek to organize in the strategic concept I call System Perturbations …

For a System Perturbation to be triggered, people's worlds need to be turned upside down, but that can be achieved in a variety of ways, not merely blowing things up the western World watching the World Trade Center towers collapse in real time TV. People were simply shocked by the image. And we all experienced it together—by design …

I must pause and interrupt here to suggest that "systems" are correctly identified by Dr. Barnett as both abstract as well as physical. The military has long thought in terms of, say, power grids, pipelines, transmission lines, roads and the like. Economists and financiers have tended to think in terms of financial networks and transaction relationships, historians and statesmen in terms of government structures. Dr. Barnett's insight is that all of these things, plus more including mass psychology, compose a systemic whole capable of being affected by a blow to one part. Gems like this why PNM is more than just another catchy, current events book of the month at Barnes & Noble.

So the medium through which the vertical shock is translated into horizontal scenarios is important, with the basic rule being the denser the medium, the more rapid and profound the transmission. So all the connectivity of the Information Age and globalization is crucial in defining the extent of the system that can be perturbed …

So the definition of System Perturbation is driven by the connectivity of globalization. Prior to globalization, there were earth shattering triggers as Jesus Christ's death and resurrection, the American Revolution and the invention of the steam engine that took years, decades, even centuries to play out …

The "speeding up" of the movement of goods, people and information toward real time—and a direct reduction of distance/space as an obstacle—is a critical change wrought by globalization.

We really do not see a System Perturbation in the way I like to define it—with all apologies to complexity theorists—until we see globalization. So for me, the first true System Perturbations were events like the Great Depression or World War II …

I would have a few other examples that were forerunners to Systems Perturbation in a less globalized world. The discovery of the New World rates top billing. A close second would be the explosion of the Mongols under Ghengis Khan and his immediate successors out of nowhere to conquer and disrupt five major civilizations—Sung China, India, Orthodox Kievan Rus, Persia and the Arab-Islamic world. Another would be the Black Death that fatally disrupted feudalism.

The vertical shock generates an outflow of horizontal waves while cascading effects can cross sectoral boundaries, actually growing with time …

The " Butterfly Effect" coupled with the " Law of Unintended Consequences"—much of pages 264-267 are examples to illustrate these effects of System Perturbation.

System Perturbations is a critical idea because globalization has made societies and economies vastly more interdependent than even a generation ago. While the formal and informal barriers of the past—tariff walls, police states, taxes, customs regulations, border controls, censorship—were mostly negative, slowing economic growth and technological progress, they also acted as a "brake" on Systems Perturbations. The Soviet Union was mostly unaffected by the Great Depression and when Hitler "disconnected" Germany, rearmament, barter and autarky paved the way to a swift economic boom. Today that "brake" is gone, creating worldwide economic growth for those countries that accept the connectivity rule sets of globalization's Core states. That connected Core is also more vulnerable to the actions of terrorists determined to strike at the system's choke points with apocalyptic force. Connectivity is both the Goose that laid the Golden Egg and the Achilles heel of globalization.

In Part II. Later this week we will look at what I think are the strategic rules of System Perturbation and how we can adapt to minimize our vulnerability during the War on Terror.

COMMENTARY: I will confess, I really dig ZenPundit's appreciation for the concept of System Perturbations because I honestly believe it is the most crucial big thought in the book—the one that will outlast all others in time. However, ZenPundit and I seem to be a worldwide majority of 2 on this subject, with everyone focusing far more on Core-Gap, Rule Sets, war within the context of everything else, Leviathan v. Sys Admin, the Military-Market Nexus, and the Global Transaction Strategy (yes, I fell victim long ago to that Pentagon tendency to capitalize Big Concepts!). I think those are all key aspects of the PNM, but to me, System Perturbations is the most revolutionary and far-reaching notion, because it fundamentally alters definitions of both war and peace, not blurring the two so much but unifying them in the singularity of Connectivity, which is the fundamental idea that drew my Buddhist friend to my work (and which gets me lots of fan mail from Buddhists all over the world).

People (often info tech professionals) love to send me emails saying I should get off connectivity as the unifying concept and focus on something more normative, like freedom or democracy. As always, I resist such efforts, not simply because such normative concepts come laden with huge cultural baggage of the sort that turns off potential allies the world over and thus feeds that "clash of civilizations" argument, but more so because connectivity is THE BIG DEAL for me. It's what generates the density of the medium we call globalization, and that density is what gives me the new definition of crisis: a System Perturbation by which Rule Sets are thrown into disorder, and whose magnitude is thus logically measured by the amount of new rules that come in its wake.

ZenPundit gets all that better than anyone else. Frankly, there has not been a review yet that has even scratched the surface of the concept, which disappoints me some, but then again, you can't be a visionary futurist if all your ideas are understandable right off the bat. Frankly, they need to age like whisky in the mind of your audience.

Then again, ZenPundit and I may simply be singular in our obsessions . . .

Still, I love his analysis here, believing it to be dead on. Nothing excites me more than to see someone run with a concept from PNM and take it places I haven't—again, that's the essence of the reproducible strategic concept.

What a minute! I meant to say the Reproducible Strategic Concept!

Here's his second post, followed again by my commentary:

The original post is found at http://zenpundit.blogspot.com/2004/09/greater-than-sum-of-parts-thinking.html

Saturday, September 18, 2004

GREATER THAN THE SUM OF THE PARTS—THINKING ABOUT STRATEGIC PRINCIPLES FOR A SYSTEMICALLY CONNECTED WORLD: SYSTEM PERTURBATIONS AND PNM THEORY PART II

The vertical shock generates an outflow of horizontal waves while cascading effects can cross sectoral boundaries, actually growing with time --Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett

Now that we have some understanding of what System Perturbation is, how do we as a society and a Core deal with the possibility—in the case of catastrophic terrorism, the probability—of wrenching changes of this magnitude? What are the possible rules or principles that govern System Perturbations?

With a concept like System Perturbations it’s helpful to try and get your mind in the same groove as that of other systemic thinkers like physicists and economists. We can’t do the same level of predictive quantification with PNM theory as in those fields because we can’t correctly anticipate the parameters or the intensity of the effects of a System Perturbation until an event like 9-11 actually happens. Afterwards the damage is quite measurable. We can however try to think in terms of constructing a model that has some analogous validity with the far more complex real world.

Here are some major principles or the "rule set" of System Perturbation as I see it at the present time:

THE RULE OF ASYMMETRY

We have been hearing a lot in the last decade regarding Asymmetric Warfare both in terms of state vs. state strategy ( China vs. the United States is the favored example both here and in China) and states vs. non-state actors like terrorists and guerillas. Asymmetry as a general principle in warfare exists whenever two opponents are relatively unequal and I highly, highly recommend brushing up on Asymmetry's ancient master strategist, Sun-Tzu and the more modern literature on the subject is quite large.

Asymmetry in terms of System Perturbation has to do not merely with size or resources but the degree of connectivity that each opponent possesses. The greater the connectivity, the more damaging a System Perturbation attack is likely to be and the less likely that opponent will care to risk making such a strike. Being in the Core is usually great, but blowback has its costs and this acts as a form of deterrence reminiscent of MAD to inhibit connected states from making such strikes. Teheran's ayatollahs, because Iran's economy is more connected and dependent upon globalized trade, are less reckless in their scale of Terror than were Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden. The potential consequences for Iran are extremely high were they to replicate a 9/11-type action so they stick to car bombs, assassinations and supporting low-rent unconventional warfare jihadism.

A disconnected, non-integrating Gap opponent like al Qaida or more fearsomely, Kim Jong-Il, has greater incentives to launch a System Perturbation because their organization or state will weather the unpredictable "cascading" effects more easily than a Core state. When you live in a cave or an underground bunker and your enemies are more numerous, richer, better organized and better armed, a System Perturbation or two will help level the playing field.

THE RULE OF THE MULTIPLIER EFFECT

To continue the above point, setting off several System Perturbations at once or in short succession is potentially far more effective at rendering an opponent prostrate than trying only one. Recall 9/11. Now imagine the plane that crashed in Pennsylvania had instead hit the Capitol building and killed a significant portion of the national legislature. The degree of chaos that would have ensued would have been several orders of magnitude greater than it was. Now imagine al Qaida had coupled their suicide hijackings with a massive cyberattack on internet communications and DoD computers.

Multiple System Perturbations will interact to reinforce each other's most destructive, centrifugal effects in terms of deconstructing or "de-integrating" the system, setting off yet other perturbations. Authority to respond to the crisis would shift to the local level away from the paralyzed national government and you would have local officials of limited experience and perspective energizing the governmental machinery but setting it to work in a host of different directions, inevitably aggravating problems or diverting resources whose use would be critical elsewhere.

THE RULE OF CHOKE POINTS

Most systems, whether we are discussing computer networks, power grids or governmental decision making have built-in "choke points" that act to self-regulate or rationalize the efficiency of the system as a whole. In terms of air travel, we have, for example, airports like O'Hare in Chicago that serve as a major "hub" with destinations radiating out like spokes on a wheel. The discussion of intelligence reform in the last few months showcased a different kind of choke point, "the stovepipe" which centralizes and narrows many strands from different directions into one.

A System Perturbations attack that hits a choke point not only ensures systemic paralysis but makes certain that the effects of the attack are maximized to reach all the origin points that feed into the targeted choke point. This is a devastating attack but difficult to pull off. Not only does it require specialized systems knowledge but a fair amount of skill and luck. The Allies attempted to disable a key, "limiting factor," German war industries like synthetic fuels and rubber production during WWII. But the subsequent Strategic Bombing Survey and Military Intelligence interviews with captured Nazis like Albert Speer revealed that German production actually increased each month up to the defeat of the Third Reich even as Allied bomber payloads grew heavier.

THE RULE OF REDUNDANCY

This rule is really quite simple. Systems that have built in layers of redundancy are decentralized enough to shrug off Systems Perturbation attacks by bypassing localized damage. The internet you are reading this blog post on was made possible originally by DoD scientists seeking to prevent a Soviet nuclear first strike from destroying our defense computer communications. Redundancy needs to be built into all our financial and communication networks on a global scale so there is no "central" target presented to would be attackers.

THE RULE OF DIMINISHING RETURNS

In terms of both offense and defense when dealing with systems-level operations, the initial investment yields the greatest return. September 11 cost al Qaida roughly $500,000 to pull off yet caused enormous damage to the world economy. Attempting to defend every vulnerable point is particularly wasteful and self-defeating. The entire system has to be retooled to resist System Perturbations, not merely guarded.

These rules represent a modest beginning in terms of looking at the strategic implications of System Perturbations but the greater the degree to which globalization advances the more validity such principles are apt to have in warfare.

COMMENTARY: Some of you may be thinking now that ZenPundit never read through my Deleted Scenes from Chapter 5, because if he had, he would have known that I originally wrote a section for PNM that ran through a number of new rules very similar to what he posited here.

But to tell the truth, I'm glad he was unaware of them, because he felt bold enough to propose some of his own—in effect, reproducing my strategic concept and coming up with very similar ideas. I won't go through his rules and compare them with mine. One, I'm too lazy/busy and two, I'd rather watch ZenPundit try.

I will say this: most of my rules really started in my embryonic understanding of connectivity based on the Y2K work I did back in 1998-1999. I held a workshop on the concept, inviting all sorts of experts (read about it in the deleted scene), and that interaction triggered the language of "horizontal systems" and "vertical systems" (eschewing the usual pluralistic-versus-authoritarian). I coupled that insight with my previous ones about the differences between vertical scenarios and horizontal ones (the two come together to form a System Perturbation) and voila! I had 15 rules. I tried these rules out on a number of occasions, the first time being with the National Intelligence Council, but they never really clicked, despite my huge effort at associated graphics (some of my best work, I always thought), so after several attempts with audiences, I simply stopped using the slides.

When Mark Warren was editing the book, that section was the first to go, and he even threatened to kill off the entire chapter on System Perturbations, but in the end, we decided it was too good to leave out, and more importantly, that it was a marker I wanted to put down—intellectually speaking—in PNM.

ZenPundit's serious and artful treatment of the concept delights me to no end, even as I know it is not likely soon to be replicated by anyone else, at last I've found someone who really appreciates the book with the same sense of rank ordering that I myself possess.

But, despite boosting my already sizeable capacity for self-love, ZenPundit's efforts make me realize that I can't give up on this concept in A Future Worth Creating. I'm not sure what "not giving up" means yet, but I intend to find out, and I thank Mark Safranski for pushing me in that direction.