Dateline: Continental flight from Newark to Providence, 5 November 2004
■"Arafat reportedly alive but in grave condition: Middle East braces for end of an era," by Paul Wiseman and Michele Chabin, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 1A.
■"U.S. prefers diplomacy with Iran, but conflict possible: Relations continue to worse over nuclear ambitions, support of terror," by Barbara Slavin, USA Today, 5 November 2004, p. 11A.
Getting my ass home after five briefs spread over four days, with a total audience in the range of 1,750, with a neat mix of flag officers (CAPTSONE on Monday in DC), intell analysts (AFCEA on Tuesday in MD), junior and senior officers (Air War College and Air Command Staff College on Wednesday in AL), and under- and graduate students in Princeton on Thursday in NJ).
Last night's effort in Princeton was pretty good. Never been to the college before, or the Woodrow Wilson School, so it's nice to check those boxes. The audience was small (by the week's standards) but fairly intense in their concentration (you can tell when the laughter bursts out like that—almost against will). Plus it was a weird mix of earnest young faces (students) and some wizened visages (some profs, some walk-ins). So a strange interweaving of facial expressions, as young students often give you that glowing, very open-face look of absorption (with that hint of anticipating the next, toss-off line they know will be funny if they can just process the reference fast enough), whereas elders tend to give you that slightly pained, this-bit-rate-is-a-bit-high-for-me expression, which can look uncomfortably close to indigestion after a bad meal (I try not to take it personally).
I started very poorly. The fatigue factor was huge, as I almost fell asleep in a chair in my hotel's lobby prior to the talk (I begged for early access to a room as I actually contemplated a nap—something awfully rare for me). But then I got a call on my cell from some journalist writing for a Marine Corp something or other and he wanted to talk about the proposal out there to generate either a separate African Command or shift sub-Saharan Africa from European Command to Central Command. The journalist had read PNM, so it was a fairly easy conversation (my usual response: neat move, but a very downstream, minor change compared to the rebalancing of the force I advocate in my Leviathan-SysAdmin model).
Then I worked a couple of slides, adding new animation that puts on screen some verbal text that I have become so used to using each time I give the brief that it finally made sense to help the audience out and give them the visual cues on top of the language (my brief's bit rate is very similar to a Nintendo game).
Treat for me was that Mark Warren, executive editor of Esquire and my good pal and editing guru of everything significant that I've written since 9/11 (the two articles for his mag, PNM, and the to-be-penned A Future Worth Creating), was in the audience with his father-in-law, a big brain of the hard-science type (chemist). The chemist's take on the material was typical of a lot of smart people I brief: he said he would need to watch the show several times before he got it all down in his head. Some briefers would be appalled at that judgment (telling me to dial down my fire-hose delivery), but I think it's just great, because it brings them to the book and the blog—all of which are meant to be experieneced like a really dense LP you want to listen to over and over again to get it all down in your skull.
I'm not interested in competing in the usual sound bite marketplace of ideas; I'm looking to create an army of thinkers who step beyond that conversation and see the connections in the whole, who get the military-market nexus, who understand war in the context of everything else. When you try to change language and mindset as I am trying to do, you're only interested in those willing to put in the serious study time. The ones who simply glance over the material and sigh, "perpetual war!" are ones you need to dismiss out of hand, because you can't create synapses that aren't there, just muscle up the ones the natural horizontal thinkers have but tend to under-appreciate.
Is there an age component to that capacity? Sure. In general, people have that capacity for horizontal thinking (seeing the connections across fields) much better when they're younger than when they're older (same reason why it gets tougher to learn new languages as you get older; you keep trying to fit new sounds into old hearing patterns). Then again, hard scientists (surprisingly enough) are often better than soft ones (like political scientists) in horizontal vision. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but it's true. There's actually far more pinheads in my field than, say, chemistry.
Also, there's a generational aspect to it, something I see in my own kids in spades. Kids growing up today have a far greater capacity for horizontal thinking than my parents' generation, who were generally taught to color inside the lines and stay within their designated lanes. My son Kevin's displayed intelligence at age 9 tells me he'll be a difficult fit in traditional educational settings his entire life, as he's almost a pure horizontal thinker (obvious to anyone who's ever watched him play either the piano or Nintendo at warp speed), which often gets mistaken for Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). Anyone who's ever had a dinner conversation with me will attest to how close I come to that definition (imagine Robin Williams merged with Dennis Miller and you almost capture my scattershot-yet-circular/repeating conversation flow). But frankly, that skill-set is why I can put on the show I do and—in certain circles—get paid a lot of money to do it. So when Kev says, "Dad, I wish other kids didn't think I was so weird all the time," I say, "Kev, some day people are going to pay a lot of money just for the privilege of watching you be weird for an hour or so."
Along those lines, when the orphanage director in Yongfeng handed us Vonne Mei back in August, her only exasperated advice (translated to us by guide David) was: "This one . . . only thing she sees is the new toy . . . only thing that matters." I know some parents would find that sort of exclamation sort of frightening, but I just smiled to myself as Vonne took Mei in her arms and one word popped into my head: perfect!
After the talk, I went to a dinner with about a dozen Princeton grads and undergrads, almost all of whom had more stuff to cite on their resume than I had when I was 35. I felt for one guy, because all he could say in his introduction was that he basically went to school at Princeton. I was basically that guy during my time at Harvard: had virtually nothing on my resume other than good grades, wasn't particularly articulate in settings like that (pretty quiet actually), fairly plodding writer, no connections to speak of—nada. In short, horizontal thinkers like myself tend to be late bloomers, because it takes so much longer for everything to come into focus. The good part is, we tend to stay young forever, because we're like toddlers our entire lives—always the new toy . . . only thing that matters.
After dinner with the students, which was a lot of fun and took me back to my days at Harvard, I sit down with Mark Warren in a local bar and we discuss the book. I value face time with Mark quite a bit, because despite our strong friendship and intense collaborative style over the (now) years, we've actually only spent maybe . . . 24 hours together face to face.
So we talked about the next book a lot and how the prospect of the second Bush Administration changed that. But since the AFWC is going to be about how to fix the world over the next two decades, it can't contain any analysis or projections that live or die with what the neocons are looking to achieve over the next four years.
And yet, asking that question (What's next for the neocons?) is a good one, one that helps me distinguish between what are the likely best steps toward A Future Worth Creating and what are likely missteps. I've been fielding this question everywhere this week, because that's the big question hanging out there on Bush II: Where is this all going to . . . at least next?
So, having been forced by circumstances several times already this week to posit what my advice would be to the President, I ran Mark through my basic argument right now about the two most important countries to Bush's second term: Iran and China. Since you already know my take on the utility of viewing China as a putative near-peer military competitor, you might be guessing that my advice would be: Take on Iran next!
But it would not. In fact, my advice would be pretty close to the opposite on Iran, because I've long believed that having Iran on the "rogue" side of the ledger will continue to deny us the stabilizing outcome we seek for the region as a whole (and if no one's gonna say it, then I will: Die Yassir! Die!). I want that outcome, but I want a cemented strategic relationship with China as much or more over the next four years, because I'm convinced we need to lock in that embryonic security bond as well as similar bonds with both India and Russia, and I see a strategy for Bush over the next four years that points in this direction.
So Mark and I ruminated on that line of reasoning, parsing out how that logic would set the book's narrative arc, and maybe result in something smaller in the meantime. This conversation cost a good two hours of sleep I desperately needed, but it was worth it. This book is coming magnificently into focus for me.
Good thing my confidence was high on this flight home, because it was a small commuter jet, the kind I can spread my personal wingspan across, touching both sides of the fuselage at once. Our first try at landing at TF Green at Providence was aborted somewhere around 2,000 feet altitude, when apparently the wind shear alert went off in the cockpit and the pilot sucked up the landing gear and powered his way out of his descent in one hell of a hurry. It was like that feeling when the rollercoaster hits the bottom of the big drop and you feel your body compress heavily into your seat. I have flown more times than I can count over the last 15 years, and I have never been in a jet than aborted a landing that late in the descent. No one spoke until we leveled off, waiting for the pilot to inform us what the hell just happened, but since his comm link was open during the landing (inadvertently?), we heard the whole thing. He reassured us that the low-level winds were difficult but not insurmountable. "For now," he declared, "our destination is still Providence." So we did another big loop around the city, everyone held their breath, and we repeated the descending glide path. This ride seemed just as rough, but he went all the way, and despite the bouncing touchdown (it's scary not to be level right at the very end!), everyone on the plane was rather relieved to be back on the ground. Moving around the island later, I can understand the nature of the problem: it's that kind of wind that slams the car door in your face as your trying to get out of your seat to exit the vehicle.
Needless to say, I'm happy to be home.
Here's the additional catch (working just off my USA Today, because that's all I could tap en route, plus I like the sheer challenge of trying to make sense of the world using just that lesser rag):
■ So it did all come down to the question of gay marriages!
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