Armed Humanitarians (8 page)

In August 2002, Barnett was employed by the Office of Force Transformation, a new office within the Pentagon devoted to big-picture thinking about how the U.S. military should respond to future strategic threats. The head of the Office of Force Transformation was a retired Navy vice admiral, Arthur Cebrowski, who had been tapped by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to be the Pentagon's in-house intellectual. From the beginning of his tenure, Rumsfeld had made it clear, in his typically brusque way, that he saw the military services, particularly the Army, as hidebound, Cold War–era bureaucracies that were wedded to parochial interests, especially when it came to procuring new equipment. The defense secretary had a point. While the military had made great technological strides in developing precision weaponry and designing elaborate command-and-control networks, the Defense Department had remained mired in mid-twentieth-century business practices and organizational behavior. And although the services paid a lot of lip service to “jointness”—under the sweeping changes enacted under the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986, they were required to coordinate their efforts and their procurement—they zealously fought to preserve their individual budgets. The Pentagon bureaucracy, Rumsfeld famously complained, was “one of the world's last bastions of central planning.”
1
The Office of Force Transformation was supposed to help drag the military and the defense bureaucracy into the Information Age.

Cebrowski, who had been a fighter pilot in Vietnam and a Navy aircraft carrier commander, was Rumsfeld's chief evangelist for this new way of doing business. He had helped popularize a concept called “network-centric warfare,” a vision of harnessing the power of information technology to dominate future battlefields. Network-centric warfare borrowed its trendy lexicon from Silicon Valley, but stripped to its essence, it was a vision of rapid, decentralized decisionmaking.
2
Much as dominant private-sector firms such as FedEx, Walmart, and Amazon.com could leverage information technology to move inventory rapidly and stay ruthlessly lean and efficient, the U.S. military wanted to use information to create a permanent advantage against all adversaries. By knitting together sensor information—drawn from cameras perched on satellites, surveillance planes loitering overhead, shipboard radars, even precision weapons themselves—and disseminating it across a network, the U.S. military would have total information superiority, empowering it to move at lightning speed. “Peer-to-peer” communication would trump traditional top-down military hierarchies.

It was an intoxicating vision. The first laser-guided “smart bombs” were used in the Vietnam War, but the U.S. military's stunning victory in Operation Desert Storm in 1991 had given the world the first real glimpse of this kind of overwhelming technological and informational advantage. The recent campaign in Afghanistan affirmed this vision: A handful of Special Operations troops with satellite communications, access to overhead surveillance, and the ability to call in smart weapons had been able to dispatch Taliban fighters with lethal precision and unprecedented speed. That vision of a technologically superior, network-enabled military appealed not only to the military but also to defense contractors and their supporters in Congress. In fact, large defense firms were particularly enamored of the concept. “Network-centric” became a convenient marketing term for any costly, high-tech piece of military gadgetry, and industry executives liked to tout the “net-centricity” of whatever piece of hardware they were selling.

In the summer of 2002, network-centric warfare was still all the rage inside the Pentagon. Yet Barnett's briefing was not a sales pitch for network-centric warfare. He was there to tell the military and the defense industry something they did not want to hear. Before joining the Office of Force Transformation, Barnett had been a strategic researcher and professor at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, where Cebrowski had served as president. In 1999, the young scholar had written an article for
Proceedings
, the professional journal of the U.S. Naval Institute. “The Seven Deadly Sins of Network-Centric Warfare” was a pointed critique of Cebrowski's vision. “If absence makes the heart grow fonder, network-centric warfare is in for a lot of heartbreak, because I doubt we will ever encounter an enemy to match its grand assumptions regarding a revolution in military affairs,” he wrote. “The United States currently spends more on its information technology than all but a couple of great powers spend on their entire militaries. In a world where rogue nations typically spend around $5 billion a year on defense, NCW [network-centric warfare] is a path down which only the U.S. military can tread.”
3

The article caught Cebrowski's attention, and he encouraged Barnett's inquiry. With some nudging from the admiral, Barnett began studying problems of globalization and how they might shape future conflict. In 1999, Cebrowski and Barnett teamed up with top executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald to present a workshop on how information technology and the rise of the global economy were changing national security. It was an eye-opening experience for both men. Encouraged by Cebrowski, Barnett began to devise a grand strategic briefing that depicted a new map of the world. Instead of the old Cold War map in which the world was divided between East and West, Barnett's map showed a bifurcated world with a “functioning core” of states integrated into the global economy, and a “non-integrating gap” that covered Central Asia, the Middle East, most of Africa, and a fair chunk of Latin America. These “gap” states were the parts of the world that were poorly integrated into the global economy; they were prone to wars, insurgencies, and humanitarian crises. And they were the parts of the world, Barnett theorized, where the United States would find itself rebuilding failed states, policing conflicts, or fighting preemptive wars against terrorists.
*

As an adjunct to this theory, Barnett forwarded a second, equally important, idea. The U.S. military, he argued, was well equipped for the “regime change” mission. It could take on any conventional military force in the world, and its air wings, armored divisions, and carrier battle groups were primed for violent, short-duration conflicts. But the military was ill equipped for the civilizing mission required in the “gap.” In Barnett's view, the U.S. military needed to be divided into two forces: a conventional military force—borrowing from Thomas Hobbes, Barnett dubbed this “Leviathan”—that could demolish any opposing country's forces; and another, hybrid, force, called “SysAdmin,” that would be equipped for nation-building missions. It would have experts in governance, infrastructure, and humanitarian aid; it would be flexible enough to work with civilian agencies, aid workers, private voluntary organizations, and contractors; and when not cleaning up after Leviathan, the system administrators would be involved in cooperative training exercises and other quasi-diplomatic missions around the globe. They would include a sort of constabulary force of lightly armored soldiers and Marines, aid workers, diplomats, and legal specialists. Its workforce would be older and more experienced.

What Barnett was articulating was not a particularly original idea. In the late 1990s, Marine Corps General Charles Krulak wrote an article outlining a “three block war” scenario in a hypothetical African country in which Marines would have to conduct a peacekeeping mission, conduct raids, and hand out humanitarian aid, all in a day's work.
4
Nor was it that new: The Romans, for instance, had two distinct words for war:
bellum
, which applied to military campaigns against the armies of other empires or city-states; and
guerra
, which described combat against tribes on the periphery of the empire.
*
The U.S. military, Barnett was basically saying, wanted
bellum
: a straightforward fight against an enemy whose soldiers wore uniforms and had regular military formations. What it was engaged in, however, was
guerra
, the thankless, ambivalent task of playing globo-cop. And it was not equipped to handle the latter.

Had the Berlin Wall never come down, Barnett probably would probably have made a career as a Kremlinologist, counting ICBM payloads in advance of arms control talks with the Soviets. But his timing was off: He graduated from Harvard University's Soviet area studies program in 1986, just as Mikhail Gorbachev began accidentally dismantling the Soviet system through
perestroika
and
glasnost
. He completed his Ph.D. in 1990—his dissertation compared Romanian and East German policies in the Third World—just a year before the final collapse of the Soviet Union.

Before joining the faculty at the Naval War College, Barnett worked at the Center for Naval Analyses and the Institute for Public Research, federally funded nonprofit research organizations. It was not the fast track to a traditional academic job in a political science department, but it gave Barnett extensive contacts with the post–Cold War military as well as with the U.S. Agency for International Development, where he worked on the “reinventing government” push that gutted the agency in the 1990s. When the U.S. military became involved in a number of nation-building exercises in Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Somalia, the military establishment seemed to view these involvements as exceptions.

Despite the military's attitude toward nation building, military personnel who had direct experience in those operations seemed to be developing an alternative view. Barnett encountered a number of individuals whose careers had become defined by what he would later describe as the hybrid nation-building “SysAdmin mode.” There was retired Army Lieutenant General Jay Garner, who led a humanitarian rescue mission in northern Iraq in 1991 in the aftermath of Operation Desert Storm. There was General Eric Shinseki, who led the NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia. In other words, despite the fact that nation building was not in fashion in the military in the first decade after the end of the Cold War, the U.S. military was gaining a fair amount of practical experience in nation building, whether it wanted to or not. After September 11, 2001, Cebrowski tasked Barnett with refining a global strategy briefing.

“Art,” Barnett later recalled, “You're asking me to come up with the grand strategy for the United States after 9/11.”

“Yes,” Cebrowski said.

“Well, can't I just go ask those who know what it is?” Barnett responded.

“They don't know,” Cebrowski replied. “If they do, they can't articulate it. Or they're too busy to articulate it, and they wouldn't articulate it to you anyway.”

Barnett drew up the slides and began working on the presentation that would later be called “the Pentagon's new map.” The ideas drew heavily on the globalization theory, and his storytelling style seemed inspired by pop-sociology books such as Malcolm Gladwell's
The Tipping Point
. Military officers were not initially receptive to the ideas outlined in the briefing. Barnett's motivational-speaker style could be glib and off-putting, and his early briefings were often met with scorn. And as critics of the Office of Force Transformation liked to point out, aside from a few pet projects, Cebrowski and his crew of strategy geeks controlled few budget lines, which were the real measure of power in the Pentagon. (As Barnett recalled later, “You're just a crank then. You're naïve. You're immature. And they demean your message by demeaning you.”)

But it was Barnett's predictions of a long-term presence in the “gap” that proved most controversial—and, briefly, landed him in hot water. I wrote a short article on Barnett's August 2002 presentation for
Defense Week
, the trade paper I worked for in Washington. The piece juxtaposed Barnett's predictions of long-term bases in Central Asia with a policy statement from Rumsfeld (“We don't have any particular plans for permanent bases”). Although
Defense Week
had a tiny circulation, its articles were often picked up in the
Early Bird
, the Pentagon's daily clipping service; those stories circulated among hundreds of thousands of Defense Department personnel. Barnett recounted what happened next in his 2004 book,
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century
. “Well, the day the article appeared in the Pentagon's Early Bird news service, I got a phone call from OSD's [Office of the Secretary of Defense] policy shop, asking, in effect, who I was and why I was saying these things,” he wrote.
5

A few weeks later, Barnett was summoned to give his briefings to a collection of DASDs (“daz-dees,” deputy assistant secretaries of defense, political appointees who supervised offices within the Pentagon). A representative from the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith was also in attendance. When the “core-gap” briefing was over, everyone in the room turned to the representative from Feith's office. “Nothing I see here goes against the stuff we're trying to do in our shop,” the representative said with a shrug.
6
Barnett was off the hook. His brief wasn't at odds with the long-term planning in the Pentagon; he had in fact distilled it quite nicely. The U.S. military was planning to ramp up its involvement in those regions of the globe deemed most vulnerable to violence and political instability. Barnett's vision of the world would take on an unexpected clarity, and his briefing would soon become quite famous within defense circles.

The former Soviet Republic of Georgia is blessed with a Mediterranean climate, mountain landscapes, and a rich tradition of wine and hospitality. But its history since independence in 1991 had been an unhappy one. It was poorly integrated into the global economy, it had suffered from years of civil war, and it was near the top of the scale on any corruption index. In short, it looked like the ideal place to experiment with molding a new state.