Thomas P. M. Barnett
 

 

Thomas Barnett was a military strategist in the Defense Department, Office of Force Transformation.  He was hired by Ret. Admiral Art Cebrowski with whom he had been working at the Naval War College in Newport, RI. Cebrowski, dubbed the 'Father of Net-Centric Warfare' had assigned him a couple of projects which led to his writing a book titled, "The Pentagon's New Map".   

I first encountered Barnett's writings when a fellow information seeker sent me links to his analysis on the military college website.  That was followed by the article in Esquire about his book, "The Pentagon's New Map".  I knew that I'd found something important but it generated more questions than it gave me answers.  Why was a military strategist discussing globalism and economic issues from Wall Street's point of view?  What was the Office of Force Transformation?  What was net-centric warfare?  New Rulesets? 

I went to his website many times to read what he wrote, but I wasn't able to build the picture of how it all fit until I watched Barnett give a presentation on his concepts at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces on C-Span.  This presentation connected enough dots for the that I could see how much trouble our country was in.  What Thomas Barnett did for me was to identify a cancerous thread in our military that was part of the conspiracy to destroy our country - our nation.  He gave me the trail head to follow to find out who they are.  He gave me their strategy and the means, methods and objectives.  I considered this presentation to be so important that I transcribed the entire program from the C-Span video archive.    [PDF

Many people considered my obsession with Barnett to be misguided because he was just a lowly military strategist who had been a professor at a military college prior to his appointment at DOD.  Big deal, right?  That's all true, but that was a clue as to how important his messages were rather than the inverse.  Some months later, C-Span had a 'Barnett Weekend' because of the buzz created by his book.   They showed another presentation given at a different military school which was followed by a caller question and answer period.  I know the callers were set-up because I tried for the entire time to get through.  I succeeded twice.  The phone rang but nobody was answering the phones. 

It didn't matter because there was one caller who asked the key question:

On the video at 2 hours 11 minutes 34 seconds -

CALLER: Dr. Barnett, I have a question about the upcoming QDR which is an in depth look at U.S. strategy, forces and policies. Do you think the senior officials at the Pentagon got a copy of your book and probably will take some of these ideas and thoughts and incorporate it into how they how they are going to reshape the armed forces that will mess with our current administration new global realignment plan?

BARNETT: Yeah.. the QDR that the caller refers to is basically a congressionally mandated massive review of our strategy and force posture around the world called the Quadrennial Defense Review.  One was done in 1993, 1997, 2001 and we have one ongoing now that is going to in effect be vetted across the system and vetted to congress across the year 2005.

The essential question you are asking is one of influence. I get this question all the time with the book. My polite response is to say that’s in effect the wrong question. It is not a question of about how influential this book is, because decision makers don’t get to the position they’re in now simply to turn over grand strategy to some professor from Newport. They’ve spent their careers getting to this point of power and influence with specific ideas in mind. I think the question to be asked about the book is whether it is accurate or not. Does it seem to provide a guide to the decision-making that you see exhibited time and time again by this administration? Not because I’m an insider. Not because I’m a Neo Con. Not because I have some special insight into the Republican mind or anything like that because I think in reality, the reaction of this administration is logical in relation to the environment that they find themselves in. You have to remember this is in many ways a 180 degree turn from a lot of the ideas they had coming in. So if this happened to this republican administration, I would argue that it would have happened to any administration.

Barnett's overview does indeed provide a guide to the decision-making of the government.  The actions of the government since September 11 have been incongruent with a Constitutional government of and for the American people.  The U.S. government has become a facade - a mere shell behind which the multinational corporations are running the 'business'.  The facade acting in the interests of the multinational corporations have 'internationalized' their economy and it is destroying the domestic economy of the United States.  The palliatives of Walmart and flooding our country with cheap labor won't mitigate the drain on the wealth of the United States.  It simply delays the inevitable. 

What Barnett is describing a conspiracy against the American people that is destroying our country.  He describes it as a military plan to support globalization for the multinational corporations.  One plus one is two.  There is a conspiracy within our military and the major triggering events for the change of direction in this administration were due to 'effect-based' operations planned and executed by the network of conspirators for the purpose of establishing 'New Rules'.  In other words, Hegelian Dialectics.  September 11th was a Hegelian Dialectic to create the societal shock that was necessary to create the environment in which 'New Rules' could be defined.   

Tony Blair gave a most interesting speech two weeks after September 11th: "The Power of Community Can Change The World".  The themes in Blair's speech correlate to those of Barnett.  That's not a coincidence.  Tony Blair is a 'communitarian' - newspeak for Communist.  Since the multinational corporations are using the communist organs of the United Nations to reorganize the world according to the utopian visions of the central planners, and the Third Way 'communitarian' Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush made the institutional changes to the U.S. government - dismantling it and putting it into the hands of the multinational corporations through public-private partnerships, it all fits.  It leads to the conclusion that there is a communist takeover of the United States in progress.  To those who say that it can't be communist because the government doesn't own the means of production, think again.  The U.S. government is merely a facade.  The multinationals have become the government, they own the means of production and they are 'leveling' the middle class to the poverty level as they bleed out our economy through 'direct foreign investment' and the export of their businesses to cheap labor countries.  

 

 

Background

One of the key pieces of information that triggered my interest in Barnett was that he was  assigned to a project named, "Year 2000 International Security Dimension".  The stated purpose of this project was to define the national security risks that were possible as a result of the Y2k date problem at the millennium rollover.  Barnett held a series of workshops with corporate leaders in the Information Systems arena to define the risks.  The disconnect was that this project began in 1998.  In the world of IT (Information Technology) systems, two years is the blink of an eye - not enough lead time to be an investigative effort. IT people had been working on the Y2k problem for nearly a decade at that point.  Any serious projects to analyze and define national security risks had already been done so there was more to the story on this project than Barnett gave.  In other words, there was another, unstated purpose.   

The output from the workshops included the best and worst case scenarios at the millennium rollover.  Best case - nothing happens.  Worst case - coup d'etat - New Rulers, New Rules.  Other documentation that was interesting was the psychological analysis of the various segments of the population within the various possible scenarios.   Given the timeframe, the subject matter, Barnett's expertise at subtext,  and other factors, there is no doubt in my mind that the real purpose of these meetings was to convey the message that following January 1, 2000, there would be a new paradigm by 'new leaders with new rules' in the United States.  Here is what Barnett said about these workshops in his presentation:

"It was a grand exploration of how we think about instability and crisis in this interconnected world. And that is really how Art Cebrowski saw it.  He saw it as a heuristic opportunity - an opportunity for teaching-learning because he knew there’d be unprecedented discussions between the defense dept and the rest of the U.S. government, between the government and the private sector and between America and the world. So we created a project and we called it the Year 2000 International Security Dimension Project.  We came up with a series of scenarios both good and bad.  Our worst-case scenario was pretty fantastic." 

As stated above, the worst case was coup d'etat.  And I believe that is exactly what happened and the presentations by Barnett and Cebrowski are briefings for those who are alert enough to hear the subtext.

So, by now you must be thinking, "nothing happened on January 1, 2000" so she must be wrong.  Consider the following statement that Barnett made in his presentation:

"Now we were interested in Y2k, but we were interested in the tech crash because we could see new rules coming in the financial sector..."

What he was alluding to was the engineered stock market tech bubble... dot.com boom and bust as discussed in the previous section on outsourcing.  This statement was also another clue that there was a different agenda for the Year 2000 project than the stated goals.  

Strategically, if you were engineering a silent coup d'etat, it would have been stupid to have the 'transformational' event occur on a date that everybody was expecting major problems.  For an 'effect-based' operation to be effective, it must occur as a surprise.  The 'transformational' event took place on September 11, 2001. 

 

Cantor-Fitzgerald

According to Barnett, Cantor-Fitzgerald liked the workshops on the Year 2000 project so much that 'they' suggested a follow-on project which they named, "New Rulesets Project".  First, it is useful to know that Cantor-Fitzgerald was located in the World Trade Center and they were the largest dealer in U.S. Government Securities.  The subject matter of these workshops was most interesting also because they were discussing action-reaction-solution - Hegelian Dialectics.  In Barnett's terminology, the action is a 'system perturbations'; the possible reactions analyzed and directed; the solution is a 'change in strategic environment' or... in IT language, "New Rulesets". 

In a December 2002 article in Esquire, the author writes the following:

 

“We really haven’t been a nation at war since World War II,” Barnett says. “We always did it on the side, so to speak. We networked ourselves with the outside world so much that our definition of national security started moving beyond the war paradigm to something else—crises that threatened our connections with the outside world.” So in the late nineties, he began thinking larger. He teamed up with the bond firm Cantor Fitzgerald and asked a question: How would the U. S. military react to a hypothetical, interconnected catastrophe like, say, a terrorist attack on Wall Street? “People heard our brief,” Barnett says, “but everyone thought we were too apocalyptic, too out-there.”

No more. Within weeks of September 11, 2001, Barnett was called to the Pentagon and installed as the assistant for strategic futures in the Office of Force Transformation, Office of the Secretary of Defense. Since then, he has been relentlessly briefing high-ranking members of the intelligence community and brass from all branches of the military on the next world and how to manage it. “September 11 was crystallizing,” he says. “We all just went, This is what we were talking about—a peacetime, war-like event that’s so profound it forces us to rethink everything.”

In the presentation, Barnett said that he didn't have a crystal ball.  He didn't need one because he was laying out the strategies that were going to be used.  With Y2k as a symbol event that would be transformational, the Y2k date problem was just an opportunity to execute the plan to the move to the New World Order of global governance. 

In another article written by Henry H. Gaffney, Jr. and Barnett titled "Globalization Gets A Bodyguard", they note the following:

To the vast majority of the world, the United States represents the leading edge of globalization—a harbinger of a future where efficient markets, political pluralism, and individual choice reign supreme. Moreover, as the new rules of this new era emerge and governments step in to regulate the markets, the United States (especially its Treasury Department) plays chief rule-maker.

From Chris Gerner's website - Amerikan Expose:

The United States IS the United Nations: The Secretary of the U.S. Treasury is the U.S. govenor of the International Monetary Fund and receives no compensation as governor from the United States, which is a federal corporation.

 

 

Back to the article by Gaffney and Barnett:

The Vision Thing

Many in the national security community who declare that we just experienced another Pearl Harbor likewise assume that the American public inevitably will remain wedded to the notion that this country must stay forward engaged militarily—no matter what the relative cost. That is a huge assumption worth examining.

First, we tend to idealize the “greatest generation’s” selfless willingness to endure the privations and sacrifices of World War II—especially on the home front.

  • It was fairly easy to demonize our enemies in that declared war, for those national regimes were truly demonic. We have a much finer line to tread in this virtual “war” against nonstate actors, for no other reason than to avoid the appearance of a generalized “clash of civilizations” with Islam itself, something bin Laden obviously seeks to promote.

 

The definition of 'virtual reality' from Bartleby's is:

abbr. VR A computer simulation of a real or imaginary system that enables a user to perform operations on the simulated system and shows the effects in real time.

So a virtual war would be an imaginary war carried on by 'actors'.  People might try to argue with me that they meant something different, by virtual war... but I will never believe it because against the backdrop of everything involving Thomas Barnett, it is piece of the puzzle that fits. 

Remember this quote from the Ron Suskind article titled "Without A Doubt"?  The language used and conceptual image given by this statement matches that of Gaffney and Barnett.  He is describing a virtual reality that they are using to reshape the world - to establish 'New Rulesets' to further the ambitions of Empire. 

“The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'

 

 

Ret. Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski, Father of Net-Centric Warfare

The following are a series of articles written by or about Art Cebrowski which - to my mind only add to the evidence.

Facing the Future: Transformation Means Making New Rules
April 4, 2005

http://www.defenselink.mil/news/Apr2005/20050404_481.html

Inevitable Surprises: Seizing the Opportunities

http://www.defenselink.mil/transformation/cebrowski_paper_20041216.html

The American Way of War
January 2003

http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles03/procebrowski01.htm

Planning a Revolution: Mapping the Pentagon's Transformation
June 2003

http://www.heritage.org/Research/NationalSecurity/wm292.cfm

Net-centric goal: a different military
November 2003

http://www.gcn.com/22_32/interview/24048-1.html

SEA, SPACE, CYBERSPACE: BORDERLESS DOMAINS
February 26, 1999

http://www.nwc.navy.mil/pres/speeches/borderless.htm

Network-centric Warfare: It's Origin and Future
January 1998

http://www.usni.org/Proceedings/Articles98/PROcebrowski.htm

 

Military Transformation - A Strategic Approach

(note:  The above titled document was at the website below but last time I checked it was gone.  I'm leaving the link for history). 

http://www.iwar.org.uk/rma/resources/transformation/military-transformation-a-strategic-approach.pdf