CHET RICHARDS REVIEWS BLUEPRINT FOR ACTION
Dr. Chet Richards, Editor of Defense & The National Interest has posted a review of Blueprint For Action by Thomas P.M. Barnett. This was a very important review, one well worth reading in full; tough but fair and frequently laudatory, written by someone in the small circle of theorists and defense intellectuals who can reasonably be considered a peer of Dr. Barnett’s.
It was, unlike most book reviews, informed commentary.
For those not familiar with Dr. Richards, a mathematician by training, he was the long-time associate of the great military strategist Colonel John Boyd, of whose ideas Richards is the
” universally acclaimed keeper of the flame” and authorized briefer since Colonel Boyd’s death. Richards is himself the author of several books on strategy including A Swift Elusive Sword and numerous articles. In addition, Richards operates the Belisarius and DNI sites, both of which I recommend highly to anyone interested in strategy or military history.
Several excerpts of Dr. Richards review of BFA ( my comments are in regular text):
“His recommendations for the Department of Defense have finally reached the “radical” level. Essentially, he wants to shrink it down to the special operators (SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers, etc.) plus airpower and put the rest of the Army and Navy and the entire Marine Corps into a new Department of Everything Else. In other words, all of the Marine Corps and about 95% of the Army would become part of Sys Admin. I am truly in awe.”
I have watched this evolution in Dr. Barnett’s thinking since the publication of The Pentagon’s New Map where he introduced the Leviathan-System Administration dichotomy. Initially, the borders were fuzzy between the two and Dr. Barnett leaned toward the conservative side of structural transformation of the armed services, chiding me for including some serious “ trigger pullers” in the Sys Admin category. Ultimately in BFA, Dr. Barnett envisioned something far more radical by making the Marine Corps the ” Mini-Me Leviathan” of the Sys Admin force. This incidentally returned the Marines to their historic role as the undisputed masters of Small Wars, a mission that is a good cultural fit for the Corps.
“Pattern for success
Like John Boyd, whom he references several times in the book, Barnett considers the range of human conflict from the national aim or vision down to tactics. Putting Barnett’s scheme into Boyd’s pattern would give us something like:
Vision: End “terrorism” and war as we know it; alleviate suffering and poverty world wide.
Grand Strategy: Shrink the Gap – connectivity everywhere.
Strategy: Six point process for “processing politically bankrupt states” (to be critiqued below) featuring internationally-sanctioned preemption when necessary.
Grand Tactics: Build support among a designated group of Core states to sanction attack for removing offending regime and funding reconstruction.
Tactics: Airpower-intensive network-centric warfare (NCW) to take out organized military forces and eliminate or capture indicted members of regime; then, actions to preclude fourth generation warfare including armed counterinsurgency and timely reconstruction of state with connectivity and “New Core” status.
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