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Dr. Barnett made an important appearance today to testify before the House Armed Services Committee on the future of the U.S. Navy and the global strategic environment it faces:

Tom’s testimony today

I appear before the subcommittee today to provide my professional analysis of the current global security environment and future conflict trends, concentrating on how accurately–in my opinion–America’s naval services address both in their strategic vision and force-structure planning.  As has been the case throughout my two decades of working for, and with, the Department of Navy, current procurement plans portend a “train wreck” between desired fleet size and likely future budget levels dedicated to shipbuilding.  I am neither surprised nor dismayed by this current mismatch, for it reflects the inherent tension between the Department’s continuing desire to maintain some suitable portion of its legacy force and its more recent impulse toward adapting itself to the far more prosaic tasks of integrating globalization’s “frontier areas”–as I like to call them–as part of our nation’s decades-long effort to play bodyguard to the global economy’s advance, as well as defeat its enemies in the “long war against violent extremism” following 9/11.  Right now, this tension is mirrored throughout the Defense Department as a whole:  between what Secretary Gates has defined as the “next-war-itis” crowd (primarily Air Force and Navy) and those left with the ever-growing burdens of the long war–namely, the Army and Marines. 

….As someone who helped write the Department of Navy’s white paper, …From the Sea, in the early 1990s and has spent the last decade arguing that America’s grand strategy should center on fostering globalization’s advance, I greatly welcome the Department’s 2007 Maritime Strategic Concept that stated: 

United State seapower will be globally postured to secure our homeland and citizens from direct attack and to advance our interests around the world.  As our security and prosperity are inextricably linked with those of others, U.S. maritime forces will be deployed to protect and sustain the peaceful global system comprised of interdependent networks of trade, finance, information, law, people and governance. 

Rather than merely focusing on whatever line-up of rogue powers constitutes today’s most pressing security threats, the Department’s strategic concept locates it operational center of gravity amidst the most pervasive and persistently revolutionary dynamics associated with globalization’s advance around the planet, for it is primarily in those frontier-like regions currently experiencing heightened levels of integration with the global economy (increasingly as the result of Asian economic activity, not Western) that we locate virtually all of the mass violence and instability in the system.   

Moreover, this strategic bias toward globalization’s Gap regions (e.g., a continuous posturing of “credible combat power” in the Western Pacific and the Arabian Gulf/Indian Ocean) and SysAdmin-style operations there makes eminent sense in a time horizon likely to witness the disappearance of the three major-war scenarios that currently justify our nation’s continued funding of our Leviathan force–namely, China-Taiwan, Iran, and North Korea.  First, the Taiwan scenario increasingly bleeds plausibility as that island state seeks a peace treaty with the mainland and proceeds in its course of economic integration with China.  Second, as Iran moves ever closer to achieving an A-to-Z nuclear weapon capability, America finds itself effectively deterred from major war with that regime (even as Israel will likely make a show–largely futile–of delaying this achievement through conventional strikes sometime in the next 12 months).  Meanwhile, the six-party talks on North Korea have effectively demystified any potential great-power war scenarios stemming from that regime’s eventual collapse, as America now focuses largely on the question of “loose nukes” and China fears only that Pyongyang’s political demise might reflect badly on continued “communist” rule in Beijing–hardly the makings of World War III. 

Read the rest here.
 

Tom has probably made the heads of many senior admirals explode today. Though, it must be said, this is unlikely to be the first time that has happened and everything Dr. Barnett said this morning was perfectly consistent with what he’s been saying and writing for years, as he made clear in his statement. It’s more where he was saying it and to whom. Coming down so hard in Congressional testimony in favor of expanding the Navy’s capacity at littoral operations at the expense of capital ship building and submarines is waving a red flag at the “Big War” crowd while executing a taunting, end-zone dance.

Ok, I exaggerated that last part, but from the text, Tom gave a very strong signal to the Committee as to where the Navy should be headed in coming years.

UPDATE!!:

Evidently, Tom also caused the heads of committee members to explode as well. Galrahn was there at the hearing and had this anecdote:

My favorite moment was during Thomas Barnett’s opening statement, which I thought was really good. Dr. Barnett said something along the lines of “I want allies with million man armies and I want them to be ready to kill people,” which is strategically exactly right.

Well, what the audio and video won’t show is the reaction by Maine Congresswoman Chellie Pingree (D), who looked to me like she was about to either feint or have a heart attack when Barnett said that. It was a priceless moment of facial expressions as she struggled to cope with the idea he was expressing. Honestly, I’m still laughing writing about it here. It was only afterward I was reminded that she is co-sponsor in the creation of a new government organization.

The Department of Peace.

Good. The whole concept of a Department of Peace amounts to institutionalizing antiwar activists on the Federal payroll to try and obstruct foreign policy and erode national security for the benefit of unfriendly and undemocratic foreign states. If Bashir Assad and Hugo Chavez want foreign agents to lobby Congress, they can hire K Street lawyers like everyone else; we don’t need to have U.S. taxpayers footing the bill to promote far Left political causes.

Tom also weighed in on his blog on the experience:

Heh.

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush by Thomas P.M. Barnett

Great Powers: America and the World After Bush is a book whose influence will be deep and long. It is also a book that will be loved and reviled. Loved because in it, Barnett connects history with strategy and foreign policy and does so with unvarnished, supremely confident, optimism regarding a future of an americanized Globalization and a globalized America. It will also be bitterly reviled for exactly same reason.

In essence, Great Powers is an intellectual-political rorschach test.

This will not be a traditional book review. By way of disclaimer, I was one of the people who read the earliest draft version of Great Powers as Tom Barnett was writing it ( at times Tom was writing faster than any of us could keep up reading it!) and offered comments and advice. I have seen various iterations of different parts of Great Powers as it was shaped by Dr. Barnett, Mark Warren and Neil Nyren and discussed the book during this time with others in Tom’s circle who were also readers. As a result I cannot possibly be considered an objective or impartial reviewer but what I am, however, is a well informed one.

What I will offer instead of a traditional review is my thoughts on why Great Powers should be read whether you admire Thomas Barnett’s philosophy or not.

First, Great Powers represents the first attempt to critically distill the meaning and the context of the historical mark of the George W. Bush presidency in a way that is not beholden to the needs of domestic partisans, Right or Left. As a result, some of these people will go absolutely ape in Chapter One and will be riding their hobby horse to the uptopian horizon of choice and never really read anything else in the book except through heavily rose colored glasses.  For everyone else, Barnett’s handling of Bush-Cheney is a needed step back from presentism and into analysis of causes and effects, risks and opportunities, which make up the global legacy of President Bush.

Secondly, Barnett is enunciating a theory of historical evolution heavily influenced by economic determinism but not only economic determinism. Very few reviewers have picked up on this element ( John Robb was a notable exception) but Tom has revived and synthesized the “Frontier Thesis” of Frederick Jackson Turner into postmodern, 21st century,  transnational terms. “The frontier” is not just an economic margin but a verge for deep but decisive conflicts of personal identity and cultural renewal. Frontiers are dynamic and psychological, not fixed entities and the momentum is usually running toward civilizational expansion or collapse. We can find the frontier at home in “feral” neighborhoods mere miles from our houses or thousands of miles distant in far off Pushtunistan and the Fergana valley. There is no maginot line we can build, no place to “bring the boys home” to when the frontier exists as much in cyberspace as on the ground.

Thirdly, Barnett articultes the strategic macro-choices (“Realignment”) that we face in the first decades of the 21st century based on the framework that our past choices have created. This last part of the book is where he generates enormous amounts of friction with more traditional policy wonk experts by de-compartmentalizing their pet issues into the agonizingly interrelated gordian knot that they represent in reality while re-buffing the idea that they add up to a collection of worst-case scenarios fusing into a mega-apocalypse. The integrated perspective pushed by Barnett also denies the likelihood of securing neat little zero-sum policy “wins” just for America (or Russia, or China or the EU). Tom gets bashed for simplifying in his briefs but briefs are not books and the problem his critics have is not his simplicity but the complexity that Barnett chooses to put on the table for debate.

That approach makes a lot of people whose education and experience is in selling or consuming the inch-wide, mile-long, tunnel -vision perspectives very uncomfortable. It is a repudiation not of their policies but of their whole mode of thinking about policy.

That brings me to why I think Great Powers should be read. An old mentor of mine used to warn his grad students of books that made them feel good by confirming their prejudices and dulling their thinking with smug superiority. Good books cause you to scrawl furiously in the margin. Despite the fact that I am in sync with many of Tom Barnett’s strategic ideas, there are parts of Great Powers that caused me to grit my teeth (case in point, his entertaining the faddish, Left-Fem polemicist, Susan Faludi as a serious thinker) or take a second look at my previously held opinions. This is what good books do and great books are the ones that do so for many people and thereby become potential game-changers.

Great Powers is one of those books.

Dr. Thomas PM Barnett                                              Dr. Milt Rosenberg

Go here to listen. They’ve been discussing the Mideast and Israel-Iran nuclear programs.

The Small Wars Journal has published an interview I conducted with Dr. Thomas Barnett regarding his new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush.

“Ten Questions with Thomas P.M. Barnett”

…. 4. In Great Powers, you delve deeply into American history. What lessons did you find in our nation’s past that the diplomat overseas, the Army colonel in Afghanistan or the U.S. Aid worker in Africa should know to navigate their mission today?

This is all about frontier integration. Globalization is like America’s rapid and aggressive push Westward across the 19th century: a lot of the same bad actors and a lot of the same tools applied. So don’t be surprised when the Pinkertons show up, or when the covered wagons are attacked, or when the Injuns head to the Badlands for sanctuary. Thus, the goals of our frontline players are fairly straightforward: create the baseline security to allow the connectivity to grow. Focus on social trust and institutions as much as possible, but co-opt existing structures whenever and wherever you can. It doesn’t have to be perfect and it sure as hell doesn’t have to measure up to America’s mature standards. This is a frontier setting within globalization-treat it as such. The good news is, the settlers are already there, with more uncredentialed wealth than we realize (see Hernando DeSoto), if you respect their existing rule-sets and realize they will change only when the locals see the need themselves, so no instant rule-set packages applied by outsiders, please. Finally, acknowledge that with growing connectivity with the outside world, you will see more nationalism, more ethnic tensions, and more religious identity. These are all natural reactions, and not signs of your failure, so patience is the key.

Read the whole thing here.

Special thanks to Dave Dilegge for providing the forum and to Sean Meade and Lexington Green with editorial assistance and astute advice.

Tom’s new book Great Powers: America and the World After Bush is not out yet but I have read two different versions. A first draft, chapter by chapter more or less as fast as Dr. Barnett was able to write it and then a near finished but yet to be finally edited penultimate version. The second incarnation I read had significant structural differences from the first draft manuscript, as it should when an author works with a professional editor and publisher on a major book.

Tom has just released some of the material that had been cut during the editing process and it’s worth a look. It’s interesting and it gives you an idea of thoughts in process for writing a large work even if ultimately, these sections received the axe:

GP: the lost chapters

Remember when Tom wrote that the deleted chapters from Great Powers would appear online? Two are now up on International Relations and Security Nework.

The original Chapter One is now Creed of an American Grand Strategist: I am a great power. And so can you!

The subtitle was Mark Warren’s idea (an obvious link to Colbert’s book), which Tom thought was pretty funny.

The original Chapter Two, ‘A-to-Z of American Grand Strategy’ is now broken into four parts:

+ A lexicon deconstructed: A-G
+ A lexicon deconstructed: H-M
+ A lexicon deconstructed: N-S
+ A lexicon deconstructed: T-Z

For now, we’re just linking to ISN. We’ll be reprinting both of these lost chapters in their entirety later in the month.

Having been both writer and an editor on a small scale, I think the natural tendency of every writer is to cling to every word. Frequently though, in making an important point, less really is more to the reader. A good editor clears away the clutter and let’s the writer’s best shine through with clarity.