Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

ARTICLE: There's a new Red Scare. But is China really so scary, By Steven Mufson and John Pomfret, New York Times, February 28, 2010

A brilliant compilation of gag-worthy thinking!

A favorite bit:

This new Red Scare says a lot about America's collective psyche at this moment. A nation with a per capita income of $6,546 -- ensconced above Ukraine and below Namibia, according to the International Monetary Fund -- is putting the fear of God, or Mao, into our hearts.

Here's our commander in chief, President Obama,talking about clean energy this month: "Countries like China are moving even faster. . . . I'm not going to settle for a situation where the United States comes in second place or third place or fourth place in what will be the most important economic engine in the future."

And the nation's pundit in chief, Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, even sees some virtue in the Chinese Communist Party's monopoly on political power: "One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages."

Can you feel the cringe?

Better stuff:

"We have completely lost perspective on what constitutes reality in China today," said Elizabeth Economy, the director for Asia studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. "There is a lot that is incredible about China's economic story, but there is as much that is not working well on both the political and economic fronts. We need to understand the nuances of this story -- on China's innovation, renewables, economic growth, etc. -- to ensure that all the hype from Beijing, and from our own media and politicians, doesn't lead us to skew our own policy."

Having lived in China during the past two decades, we have witnessed and chronicled its remarkable economic and social transformation. But the notion that China poses an imminent threat to all aspects of American life reveals more about us than it does about China and its capabilities. The enthusiasm with which our politicians and pundits manufacture Chinese straw men points more to unease at home than to success inside the Great Wall.

Mufson and Pomfret are wonderfully sensible observers of China, having lived there for the duration, as it were, of China's rise to date.

Some brutal stuff here, dished out without mercy:

In other areas, politicians and pundits also have a tendency to overestimate China's strengths -- in ways that leave China looking more ominous than it really is. Recent reports about how China is threatening to take the lead in scientific research seem to ignore the serious problems it is facing with plagiarism and faked results. Projections of China's economic growth seem to shortchange the country's looming demographic crisis: It is going to be the first nation in the world to grow old before it gets rich. By the middle of this century the percentage of its population above age 60 will be higher than in the United States, and more than 100 million Chinese will be older than 80. China also faces serious water shortages that could hurt enterprises from wheat farms to power plants to microchip manufacturers.

And about all those engineers? In 2006, the New York Times reported that China graduates 600,000 a year compared with 70,000 in the United States. The Times report was quoted on the House floor. Just one problem: China's statisticians count car mechanics and refrigerator repairmen as "engineers."

Brilliant piece. Much that needed to be said. Fear-mongers and hysterics put on notice. What's not to love?

(Via World Politics Review's Media Roundup)

WORLD NEWS: "China Unseated as Top U.S. Debtholder: Japan Takes No. 1 Spot Among Foreign Owners of Treasurys, Amid Beijing's Sale of T-Bills, Other Holdings in December," by Deborah Solomon and Mark Gongloff, Wall Street Journal, 17 February 2010.

MARKETS & INVESTING: "Beijing's rebalancing raises fears for Treasuries," by Robert Cookson and Michael McKenzie, Financial Times, 19 February 2010.

China sells a record amount of its U.S. T-bills in December and thus Japan is once again #1 U.S. debtholder.

Has China already "tired" of its role as top creditor to the U.S.?

Some say China is merely rebalancing its portfolio, putting more money into other dollar-denominated assets, like private equity and corporate debt (although this data shows none of that). So yes, a record sale, but when compared to total dollar holdings, a drop in the proverbial bucket.

China, for example, is still buying plenty of the longest-term T-bills, not something one does when doubting America's future. Plus, with the Eurozone's new troubles, the flight-to-safety dynamic is kicking in again, so the numbers may change plenty in January. Plus, China's export earnings simply slowed.

So some suspect that the real underlying trend is that China is letting the short Bills expire and putting a lot of that money in longer ones--pretty smart, one would think, given our near-term circumstances and political leadership.

The thing I would say to remember: if China decided to short the U.S. aggressively, rest assured that this strategy would be so frightening to other great powers/economies that, when forced to choose, I would expect the vast majority to step in and fill the purchasing gap rather than sit back and watch the Chinese commit a sort of financial hara-kiri and hope life would be better in a future world where the Chinese felt emboldened enough to act that rashly.

Plus, the more the Chinese would devalue the dollar, the greater the systemic pressure would be for China to allow its own currency to rise--something also fraught with a lot more danger. Frankly, I like America's odds at political stability with a currency collapse a lot better than China's with runaway inflation.

Anyway, I wouldn't expect such suicidal tendencies from the Chinese Communist Party so long as the renminbi remains pegged to the dollar. After that stops, I think the Chinese will have plenty of problems of their own to manage without picking fights with us.

NEUTRALISING THE NAXALITES: "Indian villagers trapped between rebels and police: As conflict between New Delhi and the Maoist movement intensifies, civilians are living in fear," by Amy Kazmin, Financial Times, 17 February 2010.

More interesting details on India's internal shrink-the-Gap COIN effort against the Marxist Naxalites, who have slowly entrenched themselves in the "red corridor" that runs from West Bengal to India's interior south. The Naxalites thrive in "remote, inaccessible parts of rural India," defined as places where the "state architecture" is "detached" from daily life.

COMPANIES | INTERNATIONAL: "Handset manufacturing: China groups eyes production in India; Assembly line options explored; Move could ease political tensions," by Kathrin Hille, Financial Times, 17 February 2010.

Interesting dynamic to watch: like Japanese or Korean companies of years back that decided it was better to produce in the U.S. versus face growing friction over "stolen jobs," Chinese handset manufacturers are looking to do the same in India. Chinese handsets currently account for 40% of the market, but they're facing a nationalist squeeze.

The way around that, according to a Huawei (world's second largest biggest telecom gear vendor) exec is, "We must be seen as producing Indian handsets, with Shenzhen manufacturing know-how."

Trick for China: while it lets foreign companies do the same to itself in years past, now the push is on to build national flagship brands that both conquer and dominate China's home market while asking for openness from other economies regarding the growing presence of Chinese companies--whether openly or in this stealthier fashion.

WORLD NEWS: China, Firm on Foreign Policy, Bends on Yuan," by Andrew Batson, Terence Poon and Shai Oster, Wall Street Journal, 8 March 2010.

FRONT PAGE: "Beijing hints at dollar peg policy shift," by Geoff Dyer, Financial Times, 8 March 2010.

INTERNATIONAL: "China's Bank Chief Says Currency Is Unlike to Rise," by Michael Wines, New York Times, 7 March 2010.

On Saturday the 6th, China's central bank governor said China will eventually back off from the pegging of the yuan to the dollar, declaring it a temporary response to the financial crisis This is the closest any Chinese official has come to saying the peg will end someday, even though no great hint was offered on timing.

Apparently, the NYT heard no change, while both the FT and WSJ did.

Most economists expect the government to let the yuan appreciate some by the end of the year. The Chinese had let the yuan slowly appreciate prior to July 2008, but then froze it in response to growing market tumult.

Problem for Obama: push hard on the subject in the short-term to appeal to populist impulses here in the States and possibly make the Chinese stubborn in the short-term or wait this phase out.

SECURITY | TECHNOLOGY: "Defending Against Drones: How Our Favorite New Weapon In the War on Terror Could Soon Be Turned Against Us," by P.W. Singer, Newsweek, 8 March 2010.

The first use of any new technology--outside of the military--is invariably criminal. Terrorism nowadays follows closely behind.

So yes, all our favorite technologies are eventually turned against us, as they have been throughout time. In many instances, the lucky first shot is achieved, which we absorb with aplomb most times.

And then we adjust and the trick, once unveiled, gets eminently harder to pull out again.

But, of course, as with all other new technologies, on drones we get these ominous predictions of a "few amateurs" shutting down Manhattan from one "robotics expert," who probably isn't an expert on anything else even though he's seriously extending himself here into sociology, law enforcement, politics, economics, psychology, etc. But finding these idiot savants is easy nowadays, and they are full of assertions.

Singer, leveraging such logic, notes that nowadays a lone baddie can pull off what Hitler's vast military machine never could--strike the U.S. mainland.

Brilliant point.

Hitler's entire war machine couldn't make a cellphone call either, or find itself with GPS, or . . . but you get the idea. We are totally defenseless against every crazy out there, and chaos is sure to ensue!

As they say, once you pull out the Nazis, you've officially jumped the shark in your argument.

But Singer is selling hard here. He wrote a book on robots in warfare.

Now he's selling all sorts of larger fears. Must be another book coming on.

Anyway, so long as he predicts such things in a broad fashion, he's bound to be a "visionary"!!!!

Because eventually SOMETHING WILL HAPPEN! And THEY WILL RULE! For less than $50,000!!!! (according to the all-knowing robotics expert).

Me, I will never go to Manhattan again after reading this chilling article! I mean, just look at how the island was crippled for years after being shutdown completely by 9/11. I know, I watched the non-stop TV coverage of all the CHAOS! You'd think you couldn't film chaos, because it would be too chaotic, but that's a childish point.

Bottom line: we're totally screwed.

9/11 ushered in an era of non-stop attacks by jets, which, if you didn't notice, crippled both America and the global economy. So naturally, Singer is correct in predicting that we're headed into an era in which robots deliver bombs with ease throughout the West. The only solution I can see is the usual Manhattan Project (I know, the symmetry here is weird--almost conspiratorial).

Singer says as much, demanding a national robotics strategy, something "many competitor countries already have." When in doubt, centralize planning in the government. Better yet, appoint a "czar." If we don't launch such programming, we'll end up relying--as with all things technological nowadays--on Chinese and Indian engineers, always a frightening thing (all Chinese and Indians fantasize about disabling America and ruling the planet in the resulting CHAOS!). We also need all sorts of technology restrictions.

Twenty years ago I heard all the same arguments about GPS, but the military let the technology go mainstream. Naturally, the result was global conflict and unending chaos perpetrated by lone gunmen, so we can expect nothing less this time.

Buddy, I'm in the bidness of fear-mong'ring, and bidness is goooooooood!

A recent report issued by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs highlights an enduring but growing mismatch between how America conducts its foreign policy and how the world beyond the West is spiritually evolving. Describing what the newspapers immediately dubbed a "God gap," the report (.pdf) decries Washington's "uncompromising Western secularism" as a self-imposed obstacle to broadband engagement of religious groups and parties in emerging economies and failed states. This, despite the fact that many of these religious actors are playing leading roles in facilitating their societies' embrace -- or driving their rejection -- of globalization's numerous opportunities and challenges.

Continue reading this week's New Rules column at WPR.

OP-ED: America, the fragile empire, By Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times, February 28, 2010

America's "empire" could all come crashing down tomorrow!

Why?

Well, it just could--just like the USSR fell so fast.

Oh, and a bunch of complexity stuff too.

It could happen! So America has been warned.

An amazingly empty piece. Even by ass-covering, "I predicted this!" standards, this one feels phoned in.

Ferguson has a gift for simultaneously overselling America and misrepresenting it as an "empire" while predicting its imminent demise. You get the feeling that he can't see the Bell for the curves, or maybe he just likes saying out-there things all the time.

Historians should stick with their, "I've seen it all before" smugness, because once they use it to project forward, they kill useful imagination.

(Via World Politics Review's Media Roundup)

WORLD NEWS: "Fury at unspent funds for Sudan: Only a third of cash used in four years; Strict disbursement rules under attack," by Barney Jopson, Financial Times, 17 February 2010.

WORLD NEWS: "Hope founders where ministers lack e-mail: Western blunders and the limitations of government by former rebels hold back reconstruction," by Barney Jopson, Financial Times, 17 February 2010.

The fund is administered by the World Bank, and was set up to help the South recover from the long civil war. Only 1/3rd of the more than half-billion has been spent four years into the fund's 6-year lifespan.

Blame? The WB has strict rules about how money is disbursed. Not so bad, because loose rules usually result in theft.

At this rate, it's highly unlike the whole dedicated sum will get spent on time.

So you get things like 100 schools planned, only 44 still active as projects and only 10 completed. On that one, the applying aid agencies were required to show they were active in all 10 southern states, something that's just about impossible given the lack of security in a few of them.

Second story is more of a glass-half-full bit: the WB convinces the former rebels now running the South to allow the Internet's spread.

But still, some controversy on unspent money here too.

The usual culprits here: older politicians with no enthusiasm for the project because they have no familiarity with the Web and its uses.

The WB's critics level the usual charges against Official Developmental Aid: too many ideas "parachuted" in with little understanding of the region's limitations. Good intentions not matched by local knowledge.

But the biggie is, according to Suzanne Jambo, the PR person for the former rebel group: "The World Bank is an institution that is not hands on or in post-conflict situations. So managing funds in a post-conflict situation was not in their expertise."

The plebiscite on whether or not to split the country north and south is next January. If the South succeeds in its secession, it's clear it'll be a true state instead of the fake, or kluged-together state that is Sudan as a whole. But it's also clear that it'll be a failing state right from the start.

No surprise there.

PROPOSAL: The LWV Columbia-Boone County (MO) (90 years old) proposes that the LWVUS 2010 National Convention adopt a study on the establishment of a cabinet level Department of Peace, Dec. '09

Literally, another county heard from!

If you toss the domestic violence piece, which is laudable and good but probably an orphan in this construct that's better addressed elsewhere, then the notion, in aggregate, combines a lot of the thinking behind creating a bureaucratic home for the SysAdmin function.

I honestly think that the trick would be less one of creating and maintaining such an entity than how it was wielded, with the leadership being a huge issue.

If such a department were to exist and made its case vigorously, but then nonetheless found itself having to go with the majority decision that a particular intervention was worthy, then a lot of its credibility as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy would come down to whether or not the department "stuck to its guns"--so to speak. If, when an intervention unfolded, the Peace folks wrote it off and refused to participate in the backend, declaring it the failure of peace and so on, you'd have nothing more than a blocking function within the government (resignations, obstruction, etc.)--meaning, in effect, a second State Department. Replicating that function would do nobody any good.

But, if the Department of Peace felt itself truly on the hook, no matter where it's preferred positions fell in the operation of an administration, then you'd have something truly useful lying in between Defense and State, and that would be helpful. State would know that Defense wouldn't own the situation beyond its logical due date, and Defense would know that taking on the intervention wouldn't stick it with the long-term outcome--combined with State's non-help.

The larger point: people who are clearly not war-mongers nonetheless see the need for something to fill a gap in our capabilities.

(Thanks: Alan P. Alborn)

ARTICLE: Bangladesh launches 'smart cards' for farmers, By R.G. QUAYLE, BBC, 16 February 2010

A wonderfully formalizing effect that disintermediates all the informal parasitical types--one hopes.

Anything that gets people credit for what they possess is a good thing. Can't have capitalism without credit.

(Thanks: R.G. QUAYLE)

ARTICLE: China, Iran Creating 'No-Go' Zones to Thwart U.S. Military Power, By David Wood, Politics Daily, 03/1/10

ARTICLE: Think Again: China's Military, Foreign Policy, MARCH/APRIL 2010

As water-carrying exercises go for journalists, this enthusiastic piece by Wood is as close to preferred Pentagon propaganda for maintaining the Leviathan as you will find.

Thompson's longer piece offers more context on capabilities but does little to explore grand strategic motivation other than to say, it's clear China is growing more worried about its capacity to defend its worldwide economic interests.

(Via World Politics Review's Media Roundup)

COMPANIES | INTERNATIONAL: "Fubon plans China push to exploit Beijing-Taipei trade liberalization," by Robin Kwong, Financial Times, 1 March 2010.

Fubon Financial Holdings plans on opening 200 branches in the next five years in Fujan province, just across the strait.

Another "invasion" has begun.

Fujan is expected to offer a market--on its own--that's equivalent to Taiwan within a decade. Fujan is marked off as an area specifically designated by Beijing as being open to Taiwanese business expansion.

Hong Kong got a similar deal on Guangdong province.

ARTICLE: Who's Buried in the History Books?, By SEAN WILENTZ, New York Times, March 13, 2010

Big amen on this one: there is no historical logic to pushing Grant off the $50 bill for Reagan. Sorry, but that's just ignorance (which I shared until reading Edward Jean Smith's fabulous biography recently) of our own nation's history.

Without Grant the general, the North could have easily slid into peaceful coexistence with the Confederacy, meaning the end to slavery is put off for God only knows how long.

Without Grant, the Chief of Staff, standing up to Johnson, the Reconstruction Era would have gone far worse.

Without Grant the president (and here you need to read the book for the stories), a whole lot of positive precedents and developments.

The best section from Wilentz:

Had his wife not declined to go to Ford's Theater the night of April 14, 1865, Grant might well have been killed himself. With Lincoln's assassination, Grant was left as the greatest Union hero of the Civil War. He chafed under the neo-Confederate presidency of Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, won the Republican presidential nomination in 1868 almost by acclamation and was elected twice -- the only president to serve two successive full terms between Andrew Jackson and Woodrow Wilson.

As president, Grant was determined to achieve national reconciliation, but on the terms of the victorious North, not the defeated Confederates. He fought hard and successfully for ratification of the 15th Amendment, banning disenfranchisement on account of race, color or previous condition of servitude. When recalcitrant Southern whites fought back under the white hoods and robes of the Ku Klux Klan, murdering and terrorizing blacks and their political supporters, Grant secured legislation that empowered him to unleash federal force. By 1872, the Klan was effectively dead.

For Grant, Reconstruction always remained of paramount importance, and he remained steadfast, even when members of his own party turned their backs on the former slaves. After white supremacists slaughtered blacks and Republicans in Louisiana in 1873 and attempted a coup the following year, Grant took swift and forceful action to restore order and legitimate government. With the political tide running heavily against him, Grant still managed to see through to enactment the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which prohibited discrimination according to race in all public accommodations.

Grant did not confine his reformism to expanding and protecting the rights of the freed slaves. Disgusted at the inhumanity of the nation's Indian policies, he called for "the proper treatment of the original occupants of this land," and directed efforts to provide federal aid for food, clothing and schooling for the Indians as well as protection from violence. He also took strong and principled stands in favor of education reform and the separation of church and state.

Grant's presidency had its failures and blemishes. On the advice of his counselors, Grant appointed men to the Supreme Court who wound up gutting much of the legislation he himself championed. This included the 1875 civil rights law, which the court declared unconstitutional in 1883.

Certainly, Grant's administration was tainted by oft-remembered corruption scandals. But Grant was never seriously implicated in any of them, although emboldened Democrats and disloyal Republicans, with the help of a sensationalist press, did their best to make the president appear the villain. (Grant ill-advisedly decided to present a stoic public face instead of fighting back.)

In reality, what fueled the personal defamation of Grant was contempt for his Reconstruction policies, which supposedly sacrificed a prostrate South, as one critic put it, "on the altar of Radicalism." That he accomplished as much for freed slaves as he did within the constitutional limits of the presidency was remarkable. Without question, his was the most impressive record on civil rights and equality of any president from Lincoln to Lyndon B. Johnson.

The reason why Grant is underappreciated historically:

After Grant left the presidency in 1877, he was widely hailed as the most famous and admired living American, his alleged transgressions overcome by a fabulously successful two-year world tour. He was still beloved at his death in 1885 -- a reverence embodied by his monumental tomb in Manhattan, overlooking the Hudson.

But Grant came in for decades of disgraceful posthumous attacks that tore his reputation into tatters. Around 1900, pro-Confederate Southern historians began rewriting the history of the Civil War and cast Grant as a "butcher" during the conflict and a corrupt and vindictive tyrant during his presidency. And the conventional wisdom from the left has relied on the bitter comments of snobs like Henry Adams, who slandered Grant as the avatar of the crass, benighted Gilded Age.

Though much of the public and even some historians haven't yet heard the news, the vindication of Ulysses S. Grant is well under way.

Reagan did some great things (embracing Gorby in his second term and thus enabling his dismantling of the USSR by denying him an enemy), and had his share of appalling mistakes (Iran-Contra was far worse than Watergate in constitutional terms and dramatically outdistances the tawdry money-makng scandals of Grants' subordinates), but he simply does not rank with Grant's many history-pivoting roles across the greatest crisis in our nation's history.

Without Grant, vast swaths of American history could have easily been altered. Reagan was impactful, but arrived in a far different, more complex time.

Wilentz's conclusion is sound: praise and remember Reagan all right, but not by tearing down Grant.

Memento/thank-you for spending three hours (briefing over two hours and the rest Q&A) at the Fort Knox Armor School's commanding general's senior staff off-site in Berea KY earlier this month: copy of original WW1 tank recruitment poster.

Since group out of Fort Knox, I also received super-cool ingot memento. Now my kids can go to college! But I was told not to scratch too deep. (Sigh!)

Still, take that Goldfinger!

Wonderful mementos from the day. Very impressive bunch of officers and senior civilians, all of whom are working a stunning amount of organizational change from the last BRAC (base realignment and closure).

Sean and I were trying to keep an eye out for it, but it slipped past us last week on the 10th (last Wednesday).

It was this one: What happens to a dream deferred?.

Fittingly enough, the post was all about connectivity and its causal relationship to terrorism.

The 10,000th post came just under six years (5 years, 359 days) after my first post (reposted below). That works out to an average of 1650-1700 posts a year, or 4-5 posts a day for the roughly 2,200 days since I launched the blog with Critt Jarvis--who talked me into the endeavor (and later did the same with Steve DeAngelis during his stint with Enterra).

We have fielded--and culled down to--almost exactly 15,000 comments concerning the 10,000 posts, or an average of 1.5 comments. I thank you for all of those.

Here's what I said at the start on 16 March 2004:

MARCH 16, 2004 A Beginning

Since this is my inaugural blog, I should introduce myself and explain what I hope to accomplish here on this new site.

My name is Tom Barnett, and I am currently a professor at the Naval War College, where I teach occasionally but mostly do research for interested "clients" within the Department of Defense. For example, for 20 months following 9/11, I served as the Assistant for Strategic Futures in the Office of Force Transformation in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where I put together the big PowerPoint brief that generated not just the article with Esquire ("The Pentagon's New Map") that many are familiar with, but likewise my forthcoming book (The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century) with G.P. Putnam's Sons. Right now I am helping a Navy R&D lab think about its long-range strategic futures, plus helping the Office of Force Transformation plot out possible long-term evolutions of force structure (i.e., mix of ships and aircraft) for the U.S. Navy.

I also run my own consulting business on the side called Barnett Consulting. It is a sole proprietorship where I occasionally take on contractors to facilitate my performance of certain jobs. For example, right now Barnett Consulting is working with the United Way of Rhode Island (an old client), helping them examine their organizational response to the Station Nightclub Fire disaster of February 2003. In this rather fascinating endeavor, I have enlisted the aid of my long-time collaborator and friend, Bradd Hayes, a fellow professor at the college.

As part of my work at the college, I maintain my own website here, based on the long-running NewRuleSets.Project that I have directed since early 2000. That project began as a collaboration between my department at the college and the Wall Street broker-dealer firm Cantor Fitzgerald. The project, which I describe extensively in my book (and which you can read about at both this site [soon] and the college's site), revolved around a series of workshops atop World Trade Center 1 that brought together Wall Street heavyweights, national security officials, and academic subject matter experts to discuss how globalization was altering our definitions of both national security and international stability. Obviously, that series ended on 9/11, due to Cantor's catastrophic loss of life. Within weeks, I went to work in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, where I began building and delivering the brief that has essentially changed my life.

My instructions from Art Cebrowski, director of the Office of Force Transformation, were very simple. He said basically, "Build me a brief that will described the emerging strategic environment in such a way that defense transformation is seen not just as an opportunity, but an imperative." It was his hope that my brief would elevate the discussion of transformation beyond what I like to call the "whack list," or those weapons systems and platforms (e.g., aircraft, vehicles, ships) that were to be cut as the military moved ahead on building the force of the future. Art's supposition matched my own: 9/11 would mark a tipping point of great change for the role of the Defense Department in U.S. national security. We needed to describe that great change and - by doing so - provide a compelling strategic vision of the future of war and peace in the twenty-first century. Thus the Pentagon's new map was born, although I never called the work that until Mark Warren, the executive editor of Esquire, proposed that as the name of the article he wanted me to write for the magazine. He made that proposal upon seeing the brief himself for the first time in the fall of 2002.

But I get ahead myself.

What I really want to do in these first blogs is take you through the process from stem to stern: describing how - in the space of just about a year and a half - I went from total obscurity (outside of my narrow world of national security strategic planning where I am both lauded and derided) to having Putnam gin up 100k copies of my first book. It has been a fascinating ride, and I want to get it down on paper, so to speak, before I forget it all.

I learned that lesson a long time ago, when I penned several hundred pages of emails in 1994-1996 to family and friends around the world concerning my daughter Emily's long struggle with pediatric cancer. What I later put together with my spouse Vonne in an unpublished manuscript (The Emily Updates: A Year in the Life of a Three-Year-Old Battling Cancer) began first as a sort of blog via email to a readership of about 100 people. When I read the material now, I am amazed I ever wrote any of it, because - frankly - I remember so little of it today. But that material, which is used as a teaching text for medical social workers at Georgetown University, will someday be a real gold mine to my daughter as she seeks to understand her tumultuous past. If I had never had the opportunity to do that first crude blog via email, all of that would have been lost.

I feel myself in a similarly tumultuous point in my life. I have a book coming out that may well change my life dramatically. My father is suffering a very dangerous health challenge. Vonne and I are in the process of adopting a baby girl from China this year. In short, I am experiencing some classic "sandwich generation" times: big changes in my career, big changes with my kids, and big challenges with my parents. I don't want to lose track of any of this, because it all has such meaning for me, and so I hope to get much of it down in this blog - just as I did with Emily's cancer fight.

So here's my plan for the next days, understanding that my schedule is fairly uncertain given my Dad's state of health:

-->First I want to describe the long strange process of building the brief and how it evolved - briefing by briefing - as I spread the message throughout the defense community.

-->I also want to tell the story of my interaction with Esquire and how that led to the article that changed my life.

-->Then I'd like to describe the process of getting my book sold, because that is a fascinating tale in itself. For example, Tom Clancy and I now have the same editor! I mean, just writing those nine words is a kick! I've already asked Neil Nyren, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of G.P. Putnam's Sons for permission to post the book proposal (30 or so pages) that won me the contract with his company. As he recently wrote me, Heck, it got me to buy the book!" But it did more than that, it really got me to write the book, which is the tale of my conversion from essay writer to book author at the hands of my agent, Jennifer Gates of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth of Manhattan.

-->Next I want to describe the process of writing the book, and the special role played by Mark Warren, who signed on to become my personal editor. This has proven to be a match made in heaven for me, as Mark turns out to be my missing twin somehow born and raised (by wolves, he claims) in Texas.

-->Finally I want to spend a lot of time describing the process since Mark and I finished the first draft (which is out to several hundred readers right now in what I call the "butt-ugly" bound manuscript, or advance copy version), or basically all the edits and the interactions that have ensued with Putnam as we prepare collectively to launch this book on 26 April.

The first three I hope to get done in short order, whereas the last item will be where I begin blogging in real time for real - meaning I start posting on a daily basis about stuff happening on a daily basis. As I do that, I and my webmaster, Critt Jarvis, will begin posting material from the book. Not the text, mind you, because that I sold to Putnam fair and square, but material that I wrote that did not make it into the book for reasons of pacing, etc. (although Mark may have different explanations ). I also hope, with Putnam's permission, to post all the endnotes from the book.

Critt and I have a number of other plans for the site, hoping the book's release will turn a lot of readers onto the ideas and challenges presented within. So we hope to create a certain amount of space on the site to capture feedback, encourage some discussion, and get the ball rolling in terms of a web-based debate about - what I like to call - a future worth creating.

I am very excited by this challenge. I love to write on a daily basis, and hopefully this venue will work for both me and you - the reader. I am looking for interaction and feedback, because such give-and-take with the audience - via those several hundred PowerPoint presentations over the years - is basically how I gathered or generated all the material that became the book. I have been a verbal blogger all my life, but now I hope to expand that conversation pool a whole lot.

My Dad died later that month and was buried less than a month before New Map came out. I wrote a lot of my first posts from his bedside in the hospital in Madison WI as I kept vigil with him for the first few nights after open-heart surgery.

Art Cebrowski died in the summer of 2005, as I was completing the final edit of Blueprint.

Our daughter from China was adopted in August of that year (2004), and Vonne Mei Ling Barnett is now in kindergarten.

I think I'm going to write a WPR column about writing all those posts. Probably the column after next.

I'm visiting the Camp Atterbury Joint Maneuver Training Center in Indiana tomorrow, and plan to write on that next week.

It's been a lot of fun and a tremendous amount of work to produce all the material behind 10,000 posts, and the blog has certainly changed my life in many ways, becoming my primary professional reflection point, along with my mental refuge (whenever anything disturbs me, I usually drive it out through writing).

It still stuns me that I've produced such a large body of analysis and basically made it available--for free--to anybody who wants it. I have always published under my own name and on my eponymous blog, maintaining my own personal platform.

If not for Critt, I'm not sure if I ever would have started a blog, and if not for Sean these past several years, I'm certain I could not have kept up the pace. My deepest thanks to them both.

I have no particular plans for the blog. It remains as it has always been: a workspace to organize my thinking, catalogue sources, and write whatever makes me happy to write.

I see no reason to change it.

+ Larry Dunbar linked the SysAdmin with Advise and Assist Brigades. Intriguingly enough, Dunbar says the proposed brigades would be equipped with the Government in a Box application developed in part by Oak Ridge National Laboratory, where Tom served as a strategy consultant from 2005 to 2009. Maybe all those briefs about the SysAdmin force and Development-in-a-Box had some impact?
+ And talked about 'killing' with connectivity.

+ HG's WORLD linked 'Senator's Son' a Good Window into COIN.
+ So did ShrinkWrapped.

+ China Healthcare Blog quoted Tom.
+ Spirit of 74 linked and commented on the TED video.
+ Alexandria linked O'Hanlon (with Riedel) on not bombing Iran.
+ windley tweeted The difference between Haiti and Chile.

+ Leon T. Hadar denigrates Tom as a 'pop strategist' on the 'Huntington Post'. [Tom's reply: I apologize for being popular.]