Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating - Rilegato

Barnett, Thomas P. M.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0399153128 ISBN 13: 9780399153129

Casa editrice: Putnam Pub Group, 2005

Riassunto

The author of The Pentagon's New Map presents methods by which the world can achieve the promising future described in his previous book, outlining short-term pathways for governments, institutions, and individuals while placing a focus on the particular challenges of specific international hotspots. 100,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Thomas P. M. Barnett is a senior adviser to the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Central Command, Special Operations Command, the Joint Staff and the Joint Forces Command. He formerly served as a senior strategic researcher and professor at the U.S. Naval War College and as Assistant for Strategic Futures in the OSD's Office of Force Transformation. He is a founding partner of the New Rule Sets Project LLC, and his work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and Esquire, where he is now a contributing editor.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Chapter One

WHAT THE
WORLD
NEEDS NOW

I supported the decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq. I knew our awesome warfighting force, or what I call the Leviathan, was without peer on this planet, and would handle Iraq's military with relative ease. I also knew that this war would constitute merely the first half of Iraq's transformation from authoritarian nightmare to pluralistic, connected society, and that waging that second-half effort-that peace-would be immensely hard. This second-half force of peacekeepers, which I call the System Administrators, was an army I knew many leaders in our military simply didn't want to raise, much less employ, evoking as it does painful memories of past U.S. efforts at nation building during the Cold War (read, Vietnam). Like others, I knew our military wasn't ready for this difficult task, and that its initial failures would be both acute and costly-far more than the war, in fact.

But I also knew this: No public institution responds to failure better and more quickly than the U.S. military.

And it has.

Right now, throughout the U.S. military, but especially in its ground forces (Army and Marines), we are witnessing a new phase to the military modernization process known as "transformation." What was once just the high-tech waging of war now encompasses numerous levels of operations, from the highest forms of information sharing to the simplest rules of engagement used by our troops on the ground, all of which are now focused on the new challenge at hand: waging peace. The shift is so profound that the term itself (transformation) has largely fallen from favor because of its strong identification with certain high-tech programs. So instead of focusing on classified "black projects" to facilitate the Leviathan's lofty ambitions, the Pentagon conducts secret talks with allies on how they might better shoulder the SysAdmin's many burdens. Instead of sizing itself to fight two conventional regional wars simultaneously, the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review proposed new definitions of both warfare and what constitutes victory. As so often is the case in military history, the occupation has transformed the occupier more than the occupied. The Iraq War will leave no lasting imprint on the U.S. military, but the Iraq Peace will redefine it from top to bottom, shifting transformation's center of gravity from the air to the ground, from major combat operations to postconflict stabilization operations, from the Leviathan to the SysAdmin.

And it won't be easy.

The struggles over budgetary priorities will be fierce in the coming years, as military transformation shifts from being capital-intensive (e.g., the Leviathan's hugely costly weapons systems) to labor-intensive (e.g., the SysAdmin's well-trained counterinsurgency forces and military police). The defense-industrial complex will be forced into wrenching change: from producing the few and the absurdly expensive to cranking out the many and the cheap-and increasingly the unmanned. Careers will be made and lost, industries will rise and fall, and waging peace will finally be prioritized over waging war. America will administer the system known as the global economy: policing its bad actors, engaging its failed states, and guiding the rise of its emerging pillars-all the while rooting out threats to the homeland at their points of origin.

And no, I'm not talking about some distant, personal dream. I'm talking about the new national military strategy of the United States-the most significant revamping of our military in decades-recently enunciated by the Bush Administration. The current administration entered office in 2001 with an avowed disdain for everything this new strategy embodies, but it will leave office in 2009 having remade the Pentagon in the image of the post-9/11 international security environment: the Old Core of the West (North America, Europe, Industrialized Asia, Australia) that still needs to be defended; rising New Core powers in Asia (India, China, South Korea, Russia) and Latin America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile) that need to be deeply engaged; Seam States (e.g., Mexico, Algeria, Turkey, Indonesia), lying on the edge of the global economy, that need to be further integrated; and a Gap, full of disconnected regions (Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, Middle East, Southeast Asia), that needs to be shrunk one threat at a time.

I've worked with the Pentagon for enough years to know there's a huge difference between signing new doctrines into being and fielding the forces that will bring those strategies to life. There can be no illusions about the profound task ahead: generating a new global security order that not only extends the Core's peace but ends the Gap's wars. Yes, it all starts with America and yes, it all starts with security. So the recent changes within the Pentagon are quite necessary, even if they're nowhere close to being sufficient. But even more daunting tasks lie ahead, ones that will call upon not just the military but the entire American political system, meaning each of us in our capacity as informed citizens, vocal advocates, and discerning voters.

America stands at the tipping point of possibly the most peaceful period in human history, where war as we have known it for centuries is banished from the strategic landscape. But to achieve these lofty ends, we need even loftier means. We need to end the disconnectedness that defines danger in our world. We need to shrink the Gap and all its pain and suffering-right out of existence. We need to make globalization truly global in a just manner.

And to do all these things, we need a military that will wage peace just as effectively as it now wages war. We need a new department that bridges the divide between our current departments of war (Defense) and peace (State). But most of all, we need a Core-wide capacity-an institutional capacity-to shrink the Gap one disconnected state at a time.

This is not a grand strategy that describes war strictly in the context of war, but one that seeks to place our thinking on war in the context of everything else, which today goes by the shorthand "globalization." This process of economic, political, and social integration among many of the world's states is the defining characteristic of our age, and as such, it defines conflict in this era, limited as it is to those regions still left on the outside of this historical integration process-or what I call the Non-Integrating Gap.

Many established security experts condemned The Pentagon's New Map for both its optimism and its ambition, believing it to be a complete rejection of the classic balance-of-power model and the "realism" they consider to be that model's essential underpinnings. They were right to do so, and they will be even more correct in viewing this Blueprint for Action as a further repudiation of all they hold dear. For in this book and especially in this first chapter, I aim to convince you that all the building blocks for this new global security order are at hand, awaiting only our commitment to bring them into being and employ them judiciously.

Let us begin to dispel the myths of ideology, disperse the fog of war mongering, and define the future worth creating.

Understanding the Seam Between
War and Peace

About a month before The Pentagon's New Map was published, I got a call from Greg Jaffe, Pulitzer Prize-winning defense reporter at the Wall Street Journal. Greg wanted to do a front-page profile on me and what he later called a "new theory of war." In many ways, the article was less a profile of me than of the famous PowerPoint briefing I was delivering throughout the Defense Department on my grand strategy for the United States in the post-9/11 era. As Jaffe explained it to me, there have been four great briefs in the post-Vietnam era, or presentations that so shaped a generation of military strategic thinking that each was known as "the brief" in its day. Within these four presentations lies the essential explanation of the Pentagon's current struggle to define its preferred future vision of both war and peace.

Each of the briefs was associated with its own decade, starting in the 1970s.

The first was by Colonel John Boyd, the iconoclastic Air Force colonel most famous for his decision-cycle theory (the OODA loop of observe-orient-decide-act), whose many ideas subsequently shaped not only the Marine Corps's definition of maneuver warfare but also the enunciation of so-called Fourth-Generation Warfare (based on Mao Zedong's insurgency model) by William Lind and others. Beginning in the 1970s, the "mad colonel" became famous for convincing an entire generation of future military leaders that warfare was-first and foremost-more about destroying the enemy's morale than his physical assets or personnel. Articulate and profane, John Boyd gave his brilliant presentations well over a thousand times before various defense audiences. Despite his impressive intellectual reach, this renegade reformer never became a favorite of the generals, earning as many enemies as admirers.

In the 1980s, a second great brief sought to reconcile the seemingly insatiable desire of the Reagan Administration for high-tech weapons systems with the enduring dangers of deficit spending. This presentation, by legendary Pentagon budget analyst Chuck Spinney, pushed the contemporary military debates about the future of war into the halls of Congress, earning the previously anonymous bureaucrat the cover of Time magazine in 1983. Employing long-term economic data, Spinney forced the Pentagon to confront what he called the "plans/reality mismatch." In a nutshell, this is the tendency of defense planners to insert within the annual budget submitted by the White House to Congress new programs whose burgeoning "out-year" (referring to the time period beyond the current five-year planning cycle) requirements for spending would ultimately break the bank. ...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Putnam Pub Group
• Data di pubblicazione: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0399153128
• ISBN 13: 9780399153129
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 440