Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: “A General’s New Plan To Battle Radical Islam: Top commander Gen. Abizaid uses soldiers to build health clinics and dig wells. But is it enough?” by Greg Jaffe, Wall Street Journal, 2-3 September 2006, p. A4.

Abizaid’s path to this pinnacle of influence was a very long one, and here Greg does a great job of chronicling the idiosyncratic path, including how he made a strong connection with Rumsfeld while in OSD after 9/11. Rummy wanted him for Army Chief of Staff, but Abizaid wanted CENTCOM, thus Schoomaker is pulled back in. Now, the question is, could Abizaid be talked into that job or is he burned out? I would hope for the former, but tend to doubt it, as a lot of smart money is betting on Casey now. But who knows? Rumsfeld routinely breaks those rules, picking whom he wants, and there you have to give him real credit for putting Abizaid at CENTCOM.

Now, many will be debating Abizaid’s legacy for a long time, but there’s little doubt that he will go down in history as shifting the ground forces toward this “long war” mindset, replete with a strong sense that non-kinetics will carry the day.

As Abizaid is quoted in the piece, “Military power can gain us time… but that is about it.”

Radical concept for the village-flattening types who wanna cite Israel’s tough-guy approach as what is truly needed right now, but as Abizaid has argued elsewhere (to Ignatius, for example), Iraq is the first great war of the globalization era, so the role of the military will be that of primarily a holding action--as in, buying time. The “victory” here will be economic, not shots fired.

Having lived through the successful conclusion of the Cold War, I find that description dead-on, the big difference here being that the Cold War could be a strategy of containment, whereas this Long War needs to be a strategy of aggressive engagement, not to create “globalization at the barrel of a gun” but to deal with the civil strife and political unrest that will inevitably accompany globalization’s advance into what I call the Gap, some of which will be able to handle its embrace but much of which will succumb to all sorts of distintegrating tendencies, political and ethnic violence, and governmental collapse, all of which offer numerous opportunities for those non-state and transnational actors hell-bent on stemming (or, more fantastically, reversing) its advance.

Now, we can wait until shit hits fans, and then enter guns blazing, or we can endeavor to be more Sun Tzu (Abizaid’s strategy) and less Clausewitzian in our timing and ambition, trying to grow local capacity to absorb globalization’s multifaceted challenges and opportunities instead of playing this process out with no more imagination than simply re-running the colonial strategies of a century ago.

The disappointment with Abizaid will always be his bluntness and his courage to state the obvious: this won’t be over by Tuesday, or Christmas, or the end of this administration. His career shows the power of the one leader with a vision. Without him, it’s a GWOT without focus or reality. With him, a serious tipping point is reached within U.S. ground forces about where this emerging conflict is taking them in an evolution that’s more about reaching into our past than embracing tomorrow’s technology.

This is what so many military strategists (a term I try to avoid for this reason) aren't getting right now, and thus their extreme pessimism regarding the U.S. military's capacity to wage this long war: to them it's all counter-insurgency without end. There's no "holding action" because there are no "railroads" coming and there are no "settlers" to be found. These thinkers couldn't be more wrong: the rising resistance and friction revolves around globalization's powerful and unstoppable advance, not it's lack thereof. Thus, the holding action metaphor is perfectly fine--and realistic.

It's realistic on timing and on scope, and it's on those two points where the most resistance is found within traditional military/strategic circles: just when they thought military would rule all again (oh, they were so depressed across the go-go 1990s), they're being told it's barely one-fifth the solution set and that it's still all economics and non-kinetics and messy crap they can't stand doing.

Even worse, though, is the follow-on realization: they're not needed to do all the "everything else." This isn't a question of the military or the public sector displaying the intelligence and the perserverance. The vast bulk of that will be provided by the private sector.

And before you chime in with what American companies will or will not do, let me tell you that most of this won't be done by American companies.

The one officer quoted in the piece re: Iraq has it dead-on: not mission creep but mission shrinkage. The Long War mindset admits the mission shrink, because it understands that shrinking the Gap will be more civilian than military, more rest of USG than DoD, more private sector than public sector, and more international than American.

And right there, you have my fundamental and unchanging definition of what the SysAdmin function ends up being.