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John Robb is testified today before the House Armed Services Subcommittee on Terrorism, Unconventional Threats and Capability on Terrorism and the New Age of Irregular Warfare: Challenges and Opportunities. John put up a PDF of his testimony at Global Guerillas, here is a snippet but you should read John’s text in full:

MY TESTIMONY

….Against this dark picture, a combination of assault by a global economic system running amok and organic insurgency by superempowered small groups, there are few hard and fast recommendations I can provide. It’s complex. However, it is clear:

• We will need to become more efficient. Force structure will shrink. Most of the major weapons systems we currently maintain will become too expensive to maintain, particularly given their limited utility against the emerging threat. Current efforts from the F-22 and the Future Combat System appear to be particularly out of step with the evolving environment. Smaller and more efficient systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles and coordination systems built on open platforms (as in a Intranet) that alloworganic growth in complexity make much more sense.
• We should focus on the local. In almost all of these future conflicts, our ability to manage local conditions is paramount. Soldiers should be trained to operate in uncertain environments (the work of Don Vandergriff is important here) so they can deal with local chaos. Packages of technologies and methodologies should be developed to enable communities in distressed areas to become resilient – as in, they are able to produce the food, energy, defense, water, etc. they need to prosper without reference to a dysfunction regional or national situation. Finally, we need to get build systematic methods formanaging large numbers of militias that are nominally allied with us (like Anbar Awakening, Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, etc.). Even a simple conversion of a commercial “customer relationship management” system would provide better institutional memory and oversight than we currently have.
• We need to get better at thinking about military theory. Military theory is rapidly evolving due to globalization. It’s amazing to me that the structures and organizations tasked with this role don’t provide this. We are likely in the same situation as we wereprior to WW2, where innovative thinking by JFC Fuller and Liddell Hart on armored warfare didn’t find a home in allied militaries, but was read feverishly by innovators in the German army like Guderian and Manstein. Unfortunately, in the current environment, most of the best thinking on military theory is now only tangentially associated with the DoD (worse, it’s done, as in my situation, on a part time basis).

A classy move on John’s part to take the time during his testimony highlight Don Vandergriff’s program of adaptive leadership ( another guy whom Congress should be hearing from)!

 Chairman Ike Skelton (D -Mo), judging by his impressive reading list in military affairs, is a Member of Congress who would seem to be keen to hear what John had to say. I’m very pleased to see Congress drawing upon the insights of strategic thinkers like John Robb and Tom Barnett, instead of the usual parade of niche specialists from the Beltway tanks.

WASHINGTON, DC –  Flanked by the embattled President of Mexico, Felipe Calderon and the Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, a weary looking President Barack Obama used a press conference to angrily denounce as “Alarmist and inflammatory” a recent report issued by the conservative Heritage Foundation that declared the massive chain of UN administered Mexican Refugee camps in Arizona, New Mexico and Texas as “a bottomless well for narco-insurgency” and “a threat to the territorial integrity of the United States”. The camps, home to at least 2.5 million Mexican nationals, are dominated by the “Zetas Confederales”, a loose and ultraviolent umbrella militia aligned with the feuding Mexican drug cartels that now control upwards of 80 % of Mexico.

President Obama’s political fortunes have been reeling recently in the wake of high profile incidents that include the kidnapping of his Special Envoy for Transborder Issues, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, and the car bombing assassination of popular California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger that killed 353 people in Sacramento last month. Both events have been tied directly to factions of Zetas “hardliners” who operate with impunity on both sides of the US-Mexican border. President Obama used the conference to point to the “clear and hold” COIN strategy that has recently restored order and even a degree of tourism to Las Vegas, once the scene of bloody street battles between Zetas, local street gangs and  right-wing American paramilitary groups, as a sign of the success for his administration.  Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill remain skeptical and say that it is likely that President Obama will face a primary challenge next year from Senator Jim Webb (D- Va), a former Secretary of the Navy in the Reagan administration, who called the president’s COIN strategy “The right course of action” but ” Two years too late”….

That fictional scenario above is offered as a thought experiment.

Thursday, in a statement that was issued in part for public diplomacy purposes, DNI Adm. Dennis Blair, dismissed any strategic implications regarding the strength of Mexico’s drug cartels that the Mexican government is struggling to suppress:

Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. [Let me] repeat that. Mexico is in no danger of becoming a failed state. The violence we see now is the result of Mexico taking action against the drug cartels. So it is in fact the result of positive moves, which the Mexican government has taken to break the baneful influence that many of these cartels have had on many aspects of Mexican government and Mexican life.

While it might be tempting to ask what the good Admiral is smoking, Blair is neither a naif nor a fool but a very experienced and saavy intelligence manager who is engaged in pushing a political line of the Obama administration, in deference to the wishes of the government of Mexico. The line is being peddled on many fronts; Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has just declined offers for increased appropriations for improving border security in favor of “surging” Federal agents on a temporary basis (i.e. a political show that will accomplish nothing). Here is SECSTATE Hillary Clinton on the same subject on the same day as Adm. Blair while on an official visit to Mexico:

On Thursday, Mrs. Clinton noted that no official of the Obama administration had ever used the phrase “failed state.” She said Mexico faced a “public safety challenge,” likening it to the surge of drug violence in American cities in the 1980s. And she lavished praise on the Mexican president, Felipe Calderón, for taking strong measures against the drug cartels.

This line that Mexico is fundamentally sound, while helpful to President Calderon’s political standing when expressed in public, is analytically speaking, sheer nonsense, and if enforced in private, counterproductive to having sober USG interagency planning sessions to make certain that worst case scenarios, like the one imagined above, never come close to materializing. Such politicized groupthink also interferes with effective cooperation with Mexico to address a 4GW type problem that has already mestastasized to a dangerous degree into American territory. Earlier, while still free of Mexican diplomatic and political pressure, the U.S. military accurately assessed the potential threat of Mexico devolving into a failed state in this JFCOM planning document (we won’t be seeing anything like this in public again, barring leaks):

In terms of worst-case scenarios for the Joint Force and indeed the world, two large and important states bear consideration for a rapid and sudden collapse: Pakistan and Mexico.

….The Mexican possibility may seem less likely, but the government, its politicians, police, and judicial infrastructure are all under sustained assault and pressure by criminal gangs and drug cartels. How that internal conflict turns out over the next several years will have a major impact on the stability of the Mexican state. Any descent by Mexico into chaos would demand an American response based on the serious implications for homeland security alone.

Banning terminology like “failed state” or admission of adverse data points from Mexico or the Southwestern U.S. (!) into an integrated analytical picture because the self-absorbed and greedy oligarchy that rules Mexico heatedly objects, is a recipe for policy failure and “snowballing” interrelated problems as each new development is inadequately addressed for political reasons. This new eggshell to tread carefully upon is going to be added to our longstanding, politically determined, refusal to contemplate our own drug policy honestly in light of it’s effect on our national security interests (We are turbocharging guerillas, Islamist insurgents, terrorists and criminal networks all over the globe with billions of American narco-dollars and corrupting and demoralizing our own allies in the process).

If the current situation in Mexico existed anywhere else in the world, our national security elite would already be discussing the potential for a mass exodus of refugees at given levels of escalating violence. The United States government conceives of the border in terms of an economic immigration problem not as a political mass-migration problem; such an event, spilling over into the hot deserts of the American border states, would very likely overwhelm the capacity for adequate humanitarian response. A Katrina moment in the cacti.

Recall the difficulties the Carter administration had with the relatively minor refugee influx in 1980 known as the Mariel Boatlift when 120,000 Cubans were permitted by Fidel Castro to flee the Communist paradise for life in the United States, along with imprisoned criminals and mental patients whom Castro deported along with the boatlift. A full blown civil war in Mexico could generate 20 to 30 times that number of refugees, among whom narco-guerillas or terrorists or independent bad actors could operate freely, much as refugee camps elsewhere in the world have been breeding grounds for militias, criminal organizations and terrorists.

SECSTATE Clinton, at least, should know all of this very well. The handling of the Marielitos issue by Jimmy Carter probably cost her husband the governorship in Arkansas and led him later as President to enforce a very tough line against Haitian refugees, fearing a deluge of desperately poor Haitians fleeing dictatorship and internecine political violence. It would be far better to prioritize Mexico as a national security issue today, than let it evolve into a transnational powder keg tomorrow. There are, I must observe, far more Mexicans than Haitians in this hemisphere.

But proper response requires empirical investigation and analytical clarity, followed by sensible and determined policy designed to short-circuit negative trends, not empty political assertions designed to tread water, obfuscate and delay action. We have time, but not unlimited time.

(Special thanks to Morgan, Pundita and John Robb for their insights, concerns and/or suggested links yesterday on this issue which were helpful in clarifying my thoughts).

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

State of Siege: Mexico’s Criminal Insurgency (Full PDF Article)   Stratfor reports on Mexico, news ignored by our mainstream media

Latest Academic Mexico Trip Report    “Mexico: On the Road to a Failed State?”    Mexico’s Instability Is a Real Problem

Mexico – Failed State/Failed Policies?   Among top U.S. fears: A failed Mexican state  Why Vicente Fox is going straight to Hell 

MEXICO’S BAZAAR OF VIOLENCE   What if A State Failed and Nobody Cared?   American Narcotics: $10 Billion In Mexico

Mexico: Growing Terror and Close to Collapse    The effects of our drug war in Mexico

Mexico is not a poor country   Assessing the threat at our southern border    Mexico’s Columbian Exchange    State of War

 Look who’s sneaking into the country using known drug routes   Mexico plagued by myriad interlaced netwars – a TIMN analysis

SWC Thread (Slapout) w/ Links    Mexico’s Struggle with ‘Drugs and Thugs’ (Full PDF Article) 

Sites Linking to this Post:

Soob – Top shelf analysis of Mexico’s civil war and the looming cross border nightmare NEW!

Newshoggers.com (Hynd) – Is Mexico A National Security Threat? NEW!

TDAXP – Recommended Reading  NEW!

Fausta’s Blog – The “Who painted it?” Carnival of Latin America and the Caribbean 

RBO – Zenpundit: A Mexican Standoff with Reality 

MountainRunner – It sure is quiet around here… a few links and musings during the silence 

Threatswatch.org (Schippert) – Exposición Perro y Caballo de la Administración Obama 

John Brown’s Public Diplomacy – March 30 

Peace Like a River – Cables, dispatches and memoranda 

SWJ BLog – A Mexican Standoff with Reality…

Committe of Public Safety – Cartel War Zen

Pundita – Washington continues to plays ostrich about Mexico (Riehl World View – Viva la Revolucion ; Wretchard – Our Southern Neighbor)

HG’s World – Zenpundit Channels Orson Wells in War of the Narco-Cartels

Chicago Boyz – A Mexican Standoff with Reality

More as they develop….

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.

This is good, once you get past the pedestrian observations about the economic crisis:

Eminent British-American strategist  Colin S. Gray gambles on the Sino-American War in the 21st century (hat tip SWJ Blog)

PARAMETERS –  The 21st Century Security Environment and the Future of War

How the two great powers are going to afford to fight each other, as war would destroy their interdependent economic condition, is left unsaid. As is the rationale for fighting such a war beyond “balancing” and “fear, honor, interest” or any explanation as to why nuclear weapons would not be a constraining factor on such a war breaking out though Gray does not appear to believe that Russia and the US aspire to nuclear armageddon.

Despite some nostalgia for the the halcyon days of the Sino-Soviet alliance, an interesting an often cautionary article by a noted scholar of war.