“That leads to the rule set shift that says war is no longer something you plan for in isolation. In the Cold War, the old rule said that if we went to war, it would be total, so planning for war was — in many ways — fairly simple, because you would not need to account for any simultaneous peace. War planning, therefore, was conducted with almost no reference to the larger world outside — or what I call planning for “war within the context of war.” The misalignment that emerged in the 1990s was caused by globalization itself, which generated levels of worldwide economic connectivity that soon dwarfed the sorts of wars that still occur. In other words, the global economy no longer comes to a standstill for wars, so planning for wars now has to take into consideration the rest of the peace — or what I call planning for “war within the context of everything else.” Truth be told, the Pentagon is chocked full of people with great expertise at planning wars within the context of war, but almost none with any expertise at planning wars within the context of everything else.”
Warfare in the context of everything else is hard for Americans because it means limited war. We invented Total War on the battlefields of Georgia and Virginia when Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman bled the South white. Our preponderant might in industrial mass production and the planning genius of George Catlett Marshall that gave us the logistical art to wage Total War on a planetary scale. We are slow to mobilize but are terrible in our wrath and find it difficult, politically speaking, to wage war as anything short of a crusade.
That kind of war is not needed today, nor do our elite today have the stomach for the human costs accepted by Lincoln, Wilson, FDR and Truman but it is extremely foolish to believe that no war will ever be needed. We must become accustomed to setting concrete objectives short of unconditional surrender and learn to act before we find ourselves in so perilous a situation that only unconditional surrender will do.
“The third rule-set change involves how we define the threat. The old rule set said the Pentagon should focus on the biggest threat to U.S. security emanating from the strategic environment. For most of Defense Department’s existence, that threat was the Soviet Union. When the Soviets disappeared, the Pentagon spent the nineties searching for a peer, eventually settling on China as the next best thing — a “near-peer.” But that need for a nation-state as the biggest threat blinded the U.S. to the growing danger of transnational terrorism. After 9/11, the new rule set says the Pentagon should focus on the strategic environment that generates threats, not on any one specific threat.”
Since I agree with Dr. Barnett’s argument that the Pentagon must be able to respond to a multiplicity of threats – rogue states, transnational networks, natural disatersm failed states- I will add one aspect. The fluidity of the Core-Gap dichotomy with Gap states not being able to exercise real sovereignty or control non-state actors does put an emphasis on preemptive and preventative wars – a point the Bush administration was correct to adopt but communicated exceedingly poorly. This kind of Ruke-Set cannot be articulated in such a way that Core and New Core states reasonably believe that such scary doctrines are or could be directed at law-abiding states like them. We need a Dual Standard Rule-Set in International Law and not the double-standard that exists today in the pretense that Gap states are actually sovereigns of their territories the way that Japan or France are sovereigns.
End Part I.
Page 2 of 2 | Previous page