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LIND ON BARNETT -SORT OF [ Updated]

William Lind has posted a scathing attack on the work of Thomas P.M. Barnett at Defense & The National Interest as part of a series of responses to critics and commenters on 4GW theory. Along with his reputation as a military theorist, Lind is known for his unvarnished prose and here he indulges himself:

“Among the critics and reinterpreters of Fourth Generation war, the bad is most powerfully represented by Thomas Barnett’s two books The Pentagon’s New Map and Blueprint for Action. What Barnett advocates is bad in two senses: first, that it won’t work, and second, that if it did work the result would be evil.”

Evil : Attila the Hun, Ghengis Khan, Tamerlane, Adolf Hitler….Tom Barnett ?

“In both books, Barnett divides the world into two parts, the Functioning Core and the Non-Integrating Gap. This is parallel to what I call centers of order and centers or sources of disorder, and I agree that this will be the fundamental fault line of the 21st Century. Barnett’s error is that he assumes the Functioning Core will be the stronger party, able to restore order in places where it has broken down. In fact, the forces of disorder will be stronger, because they are driven by a factor Barnett dismisses, the spreading crisis of legitimacy of the state. By ignoring Martin van Creveld’s work on the rise and decline of the state, Barnett’s books end up anchoring their foundations on sand.”

A legitimate point but a debatable one. Lind is betting on entropy and, as such, he’s wrong for a variety of reasons but this is at least an argument bearing serious examination. Unfortunately, this was the brief high point of Lind’s commentary.

“Barnett’s second error, manifested almost comically in Blueprint for Action, is that he thinks restoring the state in places where it has failed will be easy. According to a Washington Post review of Blueprint for Action by Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Barnett has a six-step plan to accomplish this: First, the U.N. Security Council acts as a grand jury to indict countries; second, the Core’s biggest economies issue “ ‘warrants’ for the arrest of the offending party”; third, the United States leads a “warfighting coalition”; fourth, a Core-wide administrative force (with the United States providing 10 to 20 percent of its personnel) puts things back together with the help of the fifth element, a new International Reconstruction Fund; followed by a sixth step, criminal prosecution of the apprehended parties at the International Criminal Court in the Hague. “That’s it, from A to Z,” Barnett notes cheerfully.”

Dr. Barnett does not think such a task is easy, which is obvious to anyone who cares to read Blueprint For Action. If it were, he wouldn’t be proposing an A-Z rule-set for processing failed states in the first place. In Barnett’s view, the sheer magnitude of the problem represented by the Gap dwarfs the resources of even the United States to manage.

“A cynic might suggest that the United States can’t even do this in New Orleans much less in foreign countries. In fact, as the FMFM 1-A, Fourth Generation War, argues strongly, even if an outside force does everything right, the probability of success in such endeavors remains low. Why? As Russell Kirk wrote, there is no surer way of making someone your enemy than to announce you will remake him in your image for his own good. To many of the world’s peoples, what Barnett argues for in such blithe simplicity represents Hell, and they will fight it literally to their dying breath.”

Where does Tom argue for remaking all countries in America’s image ?

“This brings us to the third problem with Barnett: what his books advocate does represent Hell, or at least Hell’s first cousin, Brave New World. He would create an inescapable new world order that bears a remarkable resemblance to the one Aldous Huxley described in his short novel Brave New World, published in the 1930s – a “soft totalitarianism” where the first rule is, “you must be happy.” Happiness, in turn, is a product of endless materialism, consumerism, sensual pleasure and psychological conditioning. If that sounds like a good description of American popular culture, it is exactly that culture Barnett proposes to force down the throat of every person on earth, with the U.S. military serving as the instrument of coercion“

At best, this is a straw man argument. At worst, it is wacky. Neither The Pentagon’s New Map nor Blueprint For Action called for an America to become McDonald’s gendarme.

“What Barnett’s books end up revealing is the combination of moral blindness and international political hubris that characterizes the whole quest for American world empire, a quest initiated by the neo-cons. Like the (other?) neo-cons, Barnett sees the world and its cultures in Jacobin terms, as a combination of Rousseau’s natural goodness of man and Newtonian clockwork mechanism. Just twist a few dials here, throw a couple of levers there and presto!, Switzerlands spring up from Ouagadougou to the Hindu Kush.”

While the invocation of “neo-con” as an perjorative is usually the mark of an ideological frame being substituted for analysis ( incidentally, the neoconservatives don’t particularly like Barnett’s ideas) I have a much simpler explanation for Lind’s jeremiad.

I doubt he actually read Blueprint for Action.

ADDITIONAL LINKS:

DNI Review of Blueprint For Action by Dr. Chet Richards

“Contra Barnett” by John Robb at Global Guerillas

I note there is a nice discussion evolving in the comments section at John’s official GG site

UPDATE:

Thomas P.M. Barnett responds to William Lind

(Hat Tip to Younghusband)

MORE ON STRATEGIC COGNITION

Rob of the always informative BusinessPundit posted on cognitive bias in the strategic thinking for business the same time I was reviewing Art Hutchinson’s thoughts on the subject.

There is a fairly significant crossover here between the military-political realm and the market-oriented business world when one deals with the principles and psychology of strategic thinking. Both fields must perforce deal with complexity and dynamic scenarios when setting objectives and planning how to reach them. Both fields must adjust to the systemic effects of decisions and are prone to blind spots and bias.

PNM THEORY AND HISTORY AT COMING ANARCHY

Chirol of Coming Anarchy is looking at Victorian imperialism in Egypt through the lens of Dr. Barnett’s PNM Theory; a nice interdisciplinary mix of political science and history.

“British Egypt and PNM Theory Part I“

“British Egypt and PNM Theory Part II“

An excerpt:

“According to [ British historian Niall] Ferguson, the similarities are as follow. Britain invaded Egypt to oust a Said Ahmed Arabiw, a military officer who’d seized power in a coup. He was no Saddam and the pretext for intervention was violence against European residents of Alexandria. The British government under Gladstone, like Bush, had also pledged not to engage in imperialism and nation building. In terms of strategic importance, the Suez canal was what oil is now. Over 80% of the canal’s traffic was British, 13% of their overall worldwide trade. Egypt was also heavilly in debt, largely to the British (not surprisingly, Gladstone himself held many such bonds). England intervened in Egypt against the will of the other great powers (France, Germany, Austria, Russia), which met to discuss international problems and as if almost on queue, the French protested. The British won a swift victory and remained there almost 80 years.

…First, let’s concentrate on the British economic reform of Egypt which was one of the primary reasons for the occupation. Egypt was heavily in debt, and had even sold a controlling share of the Suez to the British only a few years beforehand. Since the Egyptian government was filled with “patronage,” known to the developed world as corruption, structural reform of the various ministries was rather difficult and the money raised by shares of the Suez only provided a short lease on life for the Egyptian government, a few years. The British and French, Egypt’s main creditors, instituted a “stewardship” sending representatives to Cairo to take control of various ministries, already partial-colonization so to say. As Egyptians protested against their loss of sovereignty, unhappiness grew and a revolt finally broke out. When violence was directed against the European population there, the final line had been crossed.Prime Minister Gladstone, archliberal that he was ordered an intervention, despite international outcry against it. The French as usual did not participate,cried foul and resorting to their usual tactic of doing nothing.“

Khedive Egypt had a short-lived moment of glory under Muhammed Ali – the last great Muslim conquerer, reformer and satrap under the Ottomans, after whom Cassius Clay was renamed. After that, decline.

COUNTERINSURGENCY IS DOABLE SERIES & THE 4GW WAR OF WORDS [Updated]

Kingdaddy of Arms and Influence, who produced the high quality “Counterinsurgency is Hard” series that I featured here has begun a second, impressive, COIN series, ” Counterinsurgency is Doable -Part I.” and “ Part II“. Check it out

Also, at Opposed System Design we have insightful commentary on the war of words between the men of DNI and their critics in ” 4GW, Pro or Con“. An excerpt:

“We can avoid much of the angst associated with 4GW if we view it as a movement and not as a theory. The ranks of prominent 4GW thinkers include many of the “acolytes” of the late John Boyd. As such, they share an admirably tenacious desire to resist bureaucratic stupidity and a focus on the underlying challenges faced by our soldiers. Over the past fifteen years, they have identified non-state warfare as a challenge our military faces. The dynamics of state decline influence our national security in a significant way now, and they are dedicated to considering the consequences of these dynamics. But this is not where the controversy lies.

Where the conflict comes is when these 4GW thinkers attempt to create a historical framework for these dynamics of state power and non-state violence. By offering a simplistic model of the past four centuries of warfare, they ignore all of the variations and fluxuations the power of the state faced througout those four centuries and around the globe. In one breath Sayen acknowledges this “[the process of establishing states who possessed a monopoly on violence] did not end in the so-called “Third World” until the late 19th Century.” Yet in the next breath he avows that “…the [Westphalia] treaty’s key principles, which in essence gave states the sole right to wage lawful war, quickly spread throughout Europe and, through European colonization, the rest of the world” (emphasis added). He can acknowledge that “non-state actors have always been with us,” yet he can go on to assert that “non-staters are making a comeback,” implying that they must have be returning from somewhere.”

“Wiggins” the Wohlstetterian blogger at OSD has challenged me to throw my hat into the ring on the question of the validity of the 4GW school’s historical case for their theory, which as Lind himself recently wrote, has to do with the van Creveldian premise ” …At the core of 4GW is a crisis of legitimacy of the state“.

Challenge accepted.

UPDATE:

Military theorist John Robb at Global Guerillas weighs in:

“My take: the state vs. state generational framework of the 4GW theory has run its course. It is extremely useful as a method of describing the state’s use of proxies to fight other states. It accurately describes the rise of the use of proxy guerrilla wars by cold war opponents and proxy terrorism by developing nations as a means to achieve objectives without conventional/nuclear conflict. We’ve gone beyond the proxy model and therefore beyond the 4GW generational framework. “

Read John’s post in full.

I’m taking this debate with the seriousness it deserves and I will lay out a comprehensive critique in the near future.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED: GOING TO WAR WITH THE ALLIES YOU HAVE

From the Small Wars Council – I have to say this SSI monograph by Dr. Daniel Byman is well worth the time you will invest to read it. Byman reviews the difficulties of counterinsurgency warfare and counterterrrorism operations conducted through or in conjunction with client state security forces and evaluates most of the strengths and weaknesses of the “player” states in the War on Terror.

And it is free.