zenpundit.com

I have various soccial activities this weekend plus a chapter to finish for an upcoming book on 5GW, edited by my amigo, the serendipitous Dan of TDAXP. As a result posting will probably not occur until Sunday.

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.

Recently, discussing the media in the comment section here, Lexington Green had this to say:

Brilliant Shirkey piece.  He only leaves out one thing.  The dying incumbents are going to successfully seek money and protection from the government.  With a Democrat president and congress, their faithful allies, lickspittles, bootlickers, toadies, buttboys, catamites, lackeys also knows as “the media” will come to DC with palm extended, upright, demanding the payment that their partisan loyalty has earned.  They will get protection and money. 
.
They will not survive that much longer as a result.

In the same thread, democratic core remarked:

The Shirky piece raises fascinating issues.  The question of what the new economic model for journalism will be is interesting, and I appreciate the fact that this piece raises the question explicitly.  Contrary to Lexington’s comment, I doubt that there will be a government bailout, as the First Amendment issues would seem to make that unpalatable to both parties.  The non-profit approach is one logical evolution, where “newspapers”, i.e., centers of journalistic activites, get absorbed into non-profit institutions such as think tanks or universities to provide content to organs of information dissemination.  Another model might be the C-span model, where profitable internet organizations such as Google fund the entities we used to call “newspapers” in order to provide content for the web.  Most likely, you could have some combination of the two, as for example in the way that profit-making organizations subsidize research activities by non-profit institutions such as universities.

Now we have this. A remarkable turn-around time:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – With many U.S. newspapers struggling to survive, a Democratic senator on Tuesday introduced a bill to help them by allowing newspaper companies to restructure as nonprofits with a variety of tax breaks.

“This may not be the optimal choice for some major newspapers or corporate media chains but it should be an option for many newspapers that are struggling to stay afloat,” said Senator Benjamin Cardin.

A Cardin spokesman said the bill had yet to attract any co-sponsors, but had sparked plenty of interest within the media, which has seen plunging revenues and many journalist layoffs.

Cardin’s Newspaper Revitalization Act would allow newspapers to operate as nonprofits for educational purposes under the U.S. tax code, giving them a similar status to public broadcasting companies.

Under this arrangement, newspapers would still be free to report on all issues, including political campaigns. But they would be prohibited from making political endorsements.

Advertising and subscription revenue would be tax exempt, and contributions to support news coverage or operations could be tax deductible.

Because newspaper profits have been falling in recent years, “no substantial loss of federal revenue” was expected under the legislation, Cardin’s office said in a statement.

Cardin’s office said his bill was aimed at preserving local and community newspapers, not conglomerates which may also own radio and TV stations. His bill would also let a non-profit buy newspapers owned by a conglomerate.

“We are losing our newspaper industry,” Cardin said. “The economy has caused an immediate problem, but the business model for newspapers, based on circulation and advertising revenue, is broken, and that is a real tragedy for communities across the nation and for our democracy.

 

 

Top Blling! Dr. Steven Metz at SWJ Blog – Trends, Threats, and Expectations

Big Steve sets off a robust discussion after his participation in a Pentagon conference on strategic futurism and a SWJ Blog post.

Chicago Boyz (David Foster) – Indoctrination at U-Delaware

The heavy, taxpayer-subsidized, propaganda hand of the multiculturalist-critical race theorist Left at the University of Delaware.

FT.com – China calls for new reserve currency

I see this more of serious signal to the American elite from their nervous Chinese counterparts that the moves by the Fed to counter a deflationary spiral by running the printing press are viewed in Beijing as a serious threat to Chinese national interests. In a world of fiat currencies, a “supra-fiat currency” backed by the IMF that depends heavily on the U.S. is a hollow threat to the dollar except as a technical toy for tweaking currency fluctuations. The IMF has no economy, no vital resources, no global stockpile of gold and no ability to project military power to back such a supra-currency and give the paper value. The dollar only matters because of global faith in the power and standing of the United States – a quality swiftly being discounted due to the policies of Bernancke and the Obama administration.

Other views on this or a related topic: John Robb , The Newshoggers.com  , naked capitalism  , The Moderate Voice ( Ironically, I checked out sites by actual economists tonight, including Brad DeLong and they didn’t have anything up on this yet. Weird. Kinda like me ignoring a new war)

Fabius Maximus – All you need to know about Ayn Rand, savior of modern conservatism

FM opens up a can of worms by posting on radical free marketerr philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand, who in point of fact bitterly repudiated conservativism  (William F. Buckley and Whittaker Chambers returned the compliment by savaging Rand in a hysterical review of Atlas Shrugged in National Review). Interestingly, some of FM’s anti-Rand commenters link Atlas Shrugged with The Lord of the Rings. Amusingly, they are correct in the sense that both J.R.R. Tolkien and Ayn Rand were believers in the rebirth of the romantic epic.

Soob – Mexico’s Middle Class Head North

A really bad sign. Which makes me wonder in another domain if capital flight from the U.S. has begun yet?

Red Team Journal (Elkus) – Military Futurism

Heavy on the Futurism aspect.

CTLab Review – CTlab Symposium on P.W. Singer’s Wired For War

This is great! I have a copy of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century
but I doubt I will get it read in time. Here’s the details:

CTlab’s second symposium in its 2009 series starts next week, on Monday, 30 March, and will run for four days, until 2 April (or until participants run out of steam, which might take longer). The subject: Peter Singer’s new book, Wired For War: The Robotics Revolution and  Conflict in the 21st Century (Penguin Press: 2009).

This is going to be an exciting booklab, on a work that’s been getting broad exposure, in an out of the blogosphere. Peter Singer, a Brookings Institution Senior Fellow for Foreign Policy, and Director of its 21st Century Defense Initiative, will be participating on day 1. Proceedings will be compiled and indexed on a separate page for ease of reference, here.

Confirmed participants include:

• Kenneth Anderson (Law; American University)
• Matt Armstrong (Public Diplomacy; Armstrong Strategic Insights Group)
• John Matthew Barlow (History; John Abbott College)
• Rex Brynen (Political Science; McGill University)
• Antoine Bousquet (International Relations; Birkbeck College, London)
• Charli Carpenter (International Relations; UMass-Amherst)
• Andrew Conway (Political Science; NYU)
• Jan Federowicz (History; Carleton University)
• John T. Fishel (National Security Policy; University of Oklahoma)
• Michael A. Innes (Political Science; University College London)
• Martin Senn (Political Science; University of Innsbruck)
• Marc Tyrrell (Anthropology; Carleton University)

That’s it!

I have a new post up at the closing Clausewitz Roundtable at Chicago Boyz.

Clausewitz, “On War” Book VI: The Shadow of the East

….One of the anomalies of the crusade of Napoleon’s Grande Armee into the Russia of Tsar Alexander is that the Russians began in a position of numerical inferiority, something that had not happened at any other time except during the Mongol Yoke. Even Hitler’s massive onslaught of 150 Wehrmacht divisions hurled into the Soviet Union during Operation Barbarossa in 1941 did not enjoy the advantage in numbers held by Napoleon in 1812. Napoleon’s host had an almost mythic quality, reminiscent of the army of Great King Xerxes in The Persian Wars. Historian Alan Schom writes:

“Napoleon’s mighty force was phenomenal in size and strength as it continued its advance. They were marching by the thousands, the tens of thousands, the hundreds of thousands. It was incredible, it was fascinating, it was aew inspiring, but above all, it was terrifying. All Europe was trembling at the very thought of this massive Gallic-led horde, the likes of which had not been seen since the eighth century invasion of Europe by the Arabs and Berbers, and before that by Attila the Hun. Bavarians, Wurttemburgers, troops from Berg, Hesse-Darmstadt, Frankfurt, Nassau-Aremberg, Isenburg, Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, Wurzberg, Saxony, Anhalt-Berburg, Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, Waldeck, Schaumburg-Lippe, Westphalia, Mecklenburg-Strelitz, Oldenburg, occupied Denmark, occupied Prussia, occupied Spain and Portugal, occupied Holland, occupied Switzerland, northern Italy, the occupied Papal States, Danzig and Illyria, tiny San Marino and the miniature principality of Liechtenstein….the marched hundreds of miles, some ultimately two thousand miles, because once more Napoleon Bonaparte had refused peace, because – obsessed beyond any rational thought – he demanded war and further conquest”[1]

Tsar Alexander responded to the “Gallic horde” by trading space for time, evacuating Vitebsk and famously, Moscow, which was set to the torch. Alexander made use of the terrain, Russia’s vast and unforgiving span of earth to decimate the invaders whose lines of supply stretched vaporously thin.

Read the rest here.

The roundtable has been of superb quality and I will do a final aggregation post of the final third of the contributions once everyone has posted their concluding remarks.