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From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: August 7, 2008 6:59:28 PM PDT
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Subject: Exploring How to Make Neocon-America the Greatest Empire in
World History
DoD Looked At Ancient World For Empire Tips
"Don't Know Much About History" -- The Pentagon looks back to four
great empires for tips on how to rule the world.
By Justin Elliott
August 4, 2008, Mother Jones
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2008/07/dont-know-much-about-history.html
In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA)
published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History".
Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the
Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way
back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in
history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think
about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though
unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the
cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones
obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request.
Though the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a
mindset that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the
successor to some of history's most powerful empires.
The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting
chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and
Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared
Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires
sustained their military might across continents and even centuries.
The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into
what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S.
vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about
maintaining its military advantage in the future." There is no one
secret to world domination, however. The Mongols' military advantage
was rooted in their "tactical and operational superiority"; the
Macedonians' in the "exceptional leadership" of and "cult of
personality" surrounding Alexander the Great; Napoleon's in
"innovative operational concepts" and "information superiority"; and
the Romans' in "robust tactical doctrine" and "strong domestic
institutions" which were "designed to incorporate conquered peoples as
the empire grew." In an extraordinary passage, the study cites the
Roman experience—from over a millennium ago—as a precedent for
America's long-term dominance: "The Roman model suggests that it is
possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for
centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an
opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with
strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an
adversary to overcome."
The report's language is jargon laden and opaque—a lance used by
Macedonian horsemen is referred to as a "primary weapon system." That
may be due to the methodology of "net assessment," a fancy term for
the ONA's approach to analyzing complicated real-world situations that
is rooted in systems analysis and game theory. Military author James
Dunnigan compares it to engineering. "You take apart historical
events, reassemble them as a simulation, and then tinker with the
simulation until you can recreate the historical event accurately," he
explains. "What that allows you to do is play out 'what if?'
situations: What if Napoleon did this? What if Ghengis Khan did that?"
While the study was produced under the auspices of the ONA, its five
authors work for government intelligence contractor Booz Allen
Hamilton, and they wrote the study as part of a contract for the
Defense Department's Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center.
Booz Allen won a 10-year, $200 million cost-plus contract to establish
and "host" that center in 1998. (In May, the Carlyle Group announced
it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services arm.)
The original idea for the study predates the Bush administration. Mark
Herman, the Booz Allen vice president and war-game designer who is the
study's lead author, recalls being asked to give a presentation on
historical empires at one of Andrew Marshall's famous "summer studies"
at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1999. At that
annual retreat, experts from government, academia, and beyond are
invited to contemplate a big-picture question. Newt Gingrich, for
example, participated in the 1999 program, according to Herman. He
says that the ONA "liked the presentation so much they felt it should
be written down" and expanded.
A earlier version of the report, titled "Sustaining Military
Dominance: Examples From Ancient History," was presented at the 2001
summer study and was later cited in a Maureen Dowd column. The current
version was published a year later.
Coming out of the Office of Net Assessment, the study's theme of
military transformation is not surprising. Described by the Washington
Post as "an obscure but highly influential unit," the ONA was
established as an in-house think tank in 1973. Its founding director
was Marshall, a strategist who achieved demigod status in the press
after years of colorful profiles portraying him as a visionary. (A
2002 article in the New York Times Magazine named Marshall the "Yoda
of the Rumsfeld Defense Department"; William Safire dubbed him "the
freshest mind in the Puzzle Palace.") ONA specializes in trend
spotting and forecasting military threats. The office spent the 1980s
exhaustively studying the US-Soviet balance; recently, it has turned
to topics as diverse as neuropharmacology, Islamic warfare, and the
national security implications of climate change.
Now in his 80s, Marshall has been a chief proponent of the so-called
Revolution in Military Affairs, a cause also championed by Donald
Rumsfeld that emphasizes speed and increased use of precision weapons
and advanced communications technology. In 2001, Marshall was given a
high-profile assignment by Rumsfeld to conduct an extensive review of
the military and the possibilities of military transformation.
Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in
imperial terms.
"You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of the Bush
administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just come out
of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of a book
on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center on Peace
& Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a description of
the study. "But the administration never did that because empire
doesn't sell well with the public."
After reviewing the study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung,
director of the Arms and Security Initiative at the New America
Foundation, said he was struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The
presumption that the United States should rule the world, sword at the
ready, for the foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just,
even-handed foreign policy."
Even coming from an office vaunted for its intellectual seriousness,
"Military Advantage in History" often reads like it was meant as
window dressing for the Revolution in Military Affairs agenda—
sometimes at the expense of historical fact. (Herman says that the
theme of transformation emerged naturally from his research.) After
reviewing a section that identifies five discrete "transformations" of
the Roman military over a period of 1,000 years, Lee Brice of Western
Illinois University, president of the Society of Ancient Military
Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be
useless." In general, Brice noted, "it is inappropriate to apply
modern concepts of systems theory, doctrine, and strategy to ancient
armies. That required a level of planning and centralization that
simply did not exist."
Eland speculates that a study like this would "get warped by the
military-industrial-congressional complex into more money for
weapons." Furthermore, he says, it ignores the economic implications
of military expansion. "The Office of Net Assessment is doing this to
show, 'Well, gee, these other empires transformed themselves, they
were successful, we need to do the same thing,'" Eland says. "Well
that's going to cost big bucks, and that will cause economic
overstretch. People say it can't happen to us since we have such a big
economy, but every empire has said that." It is unclear how the study
has been used; the Office of Net Assessment declined a request for an
interview. Herman says only that "a whole bunch of [copies] went out
to the government."
The idea that contemporary society can or should try to find direct
guidance in the past has been assailed by some historians. The
American historian Bernard Bailyn wrote of "an obvious kind of
presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical
example." But the ONA study charges ahead, plumbing the past for
contemporary lessons. An extraordinary color-coded table in the
study's conclusion attempts to literally "map" the historical findings
to the United States with an eye toward "enduring dominance." (See
image above.)
Several historians who reviewed the study differed on its quality and
meaning. Walter Scheidel, a Stanford professor of classics and the
coauthor of a forthcoming survey of ancient empires, called it "a
successful distillation of relevant information and scholarship
complemented by very interesting systematic analysis." Others found
the scholarship to be shoddy and superficial. Pamela Crossley, a
Dartmouth historian who teaches on the Mongols, described the chapter
on Genghis Khan as mostly "an accumulation of popularly transmitted
misconceptions." She also noted the study's "amazingly strange
spelling 'Chengis.'"
Brice, the ancient military historian, said the text suffered from "an
intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the ancient world fit into
modern stereotypes." He compares it with "much lower-undergraduate-
level work."
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