REVIEWING THE DELETED SCENE ON SYSTEM PERTURBATION – PART II.

The previous post dealt with the concepts of Horizontal and Vertical scenarios from Dr. Barnett’s Deleted Scene on System Perturbation. Today I’m commenting on the first three rules that his workshop produced but ended up being cut from The Pentagon’s New Map. Originally, I had intended to do the whole rule set in one shot but the amount of text would probably be of burdensome length to the average blog reader so I’m going to tackle it in a series of smaller bites. Again, Dr. Barnett’s prose is in bold and my remarks are in standard text:

Continued……

“Who’s really in charge during a System Perturbation?

Rule #1: Super-empowered individuals may rule vertical scenarios, but nation-states still rule horizontal scenarios.

I got this one from a senior personal aide to the Secretary of Defense, who made the observation during a brief I gave him and a slew of his colleagues. His point was simple: a terrorist like Osama bin Laden can put together the people, money, and logistics to hijack three planes and fly them into buildings, but that vertical shock will trigger significant long-term responses from the threatened nation-states. The responses from these states are true horizontal scenarios that stretch on for years, like the global war on terrorism. A serious campaign like that takes an enormous amount of resources, which really only nation-states can muster. So, a super-empowered individual like Bin Laden can certainly pull off a “heist” here and there, but the “police” are able to spend years hunting him down. As my old boss Art Cebrowski likes to say, the terrorist has few resources, but lots of will, whereas the state tends to have lots of resources, but difficulty maintaining will, or vigilance. So it is a cat-and-mouse sort of game over the long run: he has to be shifty, we have to be relentless”

I’m generally in agreement here with a significant caveat.

Governments of great power nation-states are like ocean liners. Once bureaucratic resistance to a policy is overcome and a new policy direction is set a tremendous power of institutional momentum develops that future officeholders can stop or reverse course only with the greatest difficulty and even that over a period of time. Stalin, allegedly, is once said to have asked of one of his henchmen ” How much does the state weigh ? ” – it weighs one hell of a lot if it comes breathing down your neck ! Just ask Saddam. So I do agree, horizontal scenarios keep unfolding for years after the System Perturbation that triggered the response.

My caveat is the concept of ” marginality “. All systems have tipping points where the accumulated stress is too much to bear and the ability of the system or state to self-regulate, enforce rule-sets and reproduce their core values is exceeded. Suddenly, a once formidible regime like the USSR finds it’s own elite security troops unreliable and long-dormant regions have sprung to life and begun pulling away from the center. While it is unlikely that a superempowered individual on their own could spark such a crisis, a System Perturbation could, at the right time, push an already strained system over the edge.

Rule #2: Vertical scenarios choose us, but we choose horizontal scenarios.

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