"Barnett sits on a consulting panel to U.S. Special Operations Command, regularly briefs senior military leaders and politicians, and is firmly convinced that, with the Iraq occupation in mind, the Pentagon finally is listening to him and other strategists who believe the military knows how to win a war, but not the peace that follows."
"On one side of the screen, Barnett places �your dad�s military� � the shock-and-awe portion of the show � bombers, tanks and submarines. On the other side is �your mom�s military� � the peacekeeping, nation-building stuff the Pentagon has wanted nothing to do with for decades. There is a bit of a murmur in the audience when Barnett clicks and gives mom the tough-guy Marines and part of Special Operations Command." After almost 1800 fatalities in "pacified" Iraq, SOMEBODY ought to be listening... David Bier http://www.defensenews.com/story.php?F=985598&C=america Posted 07/25/05 15:33 Print-friendly version Forward Thinking Strategist�s Vision for the Military Prompts Leaders To Take Different View By GORDON TROWBRIDGE, NEWPORT, R.I. It gets quiet when the World�s Greatest Briefer picks up his clicker. But more than an hour in, some in the audience shift uncomfortably as Thomas P.M. Barnett, PowerPoint master and best-selling author, begins moving pieces of the U.S. military around. On one side of the screen, Barnett places �your dad�s military� � the shock-and-awe portion of the show � bombers, tanks and submarines. On the other side is �your mom�s military� � the peacekeeping, nation-building stuff the Pentagon has wanted nothing to do with for decades. There is a bit of a murmur in the audience when Barnett clicks and gives mom the tough-guy Marines and part of Special Operations Command. It�s one of the ways the hottest thinker in military strategy would reorder the U.S. defense establishment, according to a unified theory of war in the 21st century that involves everything from high-tech weapons to the price of oil and computer chips. Barnett�s vision, laid out in �The Pentagon�s New Map,� a 2004 best seller, would � if made real � bring huge change to the U.S. military and the men and women in it. The tall Wisconsin native, a former Naval War College professor, seeks to join the ranks of thinkers who, by the force of their theories, changed the world � or at least the military part of it. And while drawing the link between Barnett�s abstractions and real-world policy is difficult, his sweeping ideas are having an impact. �The interesting thing to me is how many people at the colonel or lieutenant colonel or captain level, the commander level, have picked up the book,� says Hank Gaffney, a strategy analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses who supervised much of Barnett�s early research. �It is remarkable how many people � have some familiarity with it.� Barnett sits on a consulting panel to U.S. Special Operations Command, regularly briefs senior military leaders and politicians, and is firmly convinced that, with the Iraq occupation in mind, the Pentagon finally is listening to him and other strategists who believe the military knows how to win a war, but not the peace that follows. With his follow-up book scheduled for release this fall and a high-profile writing job for Esquire magazine, Barnett has a burgeoning career as an entrepreneur of ideas. He portrays his mission in near-religious terms. �[We] bring people in who feel themselves drawn to this kind of view of the world,� Barnett says during a break from a two-day war game in May sponsored by his consulting firm. �We give them a communal experience to solidify their belief in it, and we send them out as disciples, to do good.� Fighting in the �Gap� Barnett�s career is almost entirely within the military-analytical complex: Naval War College, Office of the Secretary of Defense, Center for Naval Analyses. The centerpiece of his ideas, however, is not bullets and bombs. It�s money � or, more accurately, the spread of economic globalization. Barnett splits the world in two: A �Functioning Core� of nations, fully plugged into the global economy. A �Non-Integrating Gap,� countries unwilling or unable to follow suit. The first group includes a stalwart �Old Core� of the United States, Western Europe and Japan, and emerging core states such as China, India and Brazil. The Gap is a mix of theocracies, dictatorships, die-hard communists and failed states. The Gap, Barnett says, is where the U.S. military does almost all of its business, where the vast majority of military responses to crises since the end of the Cold War have occurred. �This,� he writes, �is the expeditionary theater for the U.S. military in the 21st century.� That�s where things get interesting for those in the military. Barnett contends the United States must maintain its dominance in traditional military terms � remain, to use his term, the �leviathan.� What�s missing is a force to cope with what comes after a war, for example, with the occupation of Iraq. Borrowing a term from computer networking, Barnett calls this the �system administrator� force. If the leviathan is for winning wars, he says, the SysAdmin wins the peace. Finding ready listeners in Iraq, Barnett says, vividly demonstrates the need to establish such a force. At the May war game, before an audience of 40 or so officers, defense contractors and academics, he outlines a new �SysAdmin Department,� divvying up the current Defense Department. In his view, expecting soldiers and Marines trained for combat to become peacekeepers and rebuilding experts is folly. �It�s time to admit that you can�t have the same 19-year-old kid doing all these things,� he says. But this is not an argument calculated to curry favor with large parts of the defense establishment. Money that the services and contractors want spent on countering, say, China, would instead go to creating a peacekeeping stability force. Big wars are seen as nearly obsolete, replaced by many smaller, murkier missions. �A lot of people just don�t want to hear this,� he says. But a lot of people are listening � and many of them in uniform. Twice, for example, Barnett has briefed the Air Force�s Senior Leader Orientation Course for newly minted general officers and senior civilians. Brig. Gen. Richard Hassan, head of the Air Force Senior Leader Management Office, calls the briefings a step toward getting the service�s leaders to think about more than just the Air Force, or even just the military. Hassan was at Barnett�s May war game. Richard Berklund, a retired Army major who studies strategic futures at U.S. Joint Forces Command, asked for a copy of Barnett�s PowerPoint slides the first time he saw the brief. �A view � perhaps not the view,� is how Berklund, who spent much of his career in special operations, describes Barnett�s work. �My initial response was the usual military guy�s reaction to calls for huge changes in the force structure he grew up in.� After seeing the presentation twice, Berklund says he admires much of Barnett�s approach, and that many others in the special operations community do, as well. The follow-up to �The Pentagon�s New Map,� due in October, is likely to intensify the debate. Barnett describes the first book as largely looking backward � how we got to today�s situation. But the Pentagon, he says, is already arguing over the post-Iraq military; what it will look like, how it will fight. The upcoming book will largely be aimed at influencing that debate. �The challenge of the second book � was to kind of stretch the arguments further,� he says. �It�s not enough to just offer a diagnostic of what led up to Afghanistan and Iraq. �Why I wanted to write the second book is to make sure I was pushing the envelope, to continue to stay just on the edge of plausibility, where people say, �God, that�s never going to happen.�� E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------ Yahoo! Groups Sponsor --------------------~--> <font face=arial size=-1><a href="http://us.ard.yahoo.com/SIG=12hhqo4ai/M=362329.6886306.7839369.3040540/D=groups/S=1705323667:TM/Y=YAHOO/EXP=1122782971/A=2894321/R=0/SIG=11dvsfulr/*http://youthnoise.com/page.php?page_id=1992 ">Fair play? 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