Now we have the so-called wise men, your George Kennans, Chip Bohlens, and what not, your Dean Achesons.   In the aftermath of the second world war, they looked around the planet, they said we’ve lived through two world wars, where are the major sources of violence and insecurity in the system. They decided, not surprisingly, it was Germany, Japan and the Soviet Russia.  So they put together a package to buy off the first two and wait out the third.  They structured a future and they restructured the U.S. National Security establishment to meet that future and their dream, an amazing dream was that maybe by the end of the century Japan and Germany would be so pacified we’d never have to worry about them again in terms of great power war and maybe the Soviet Union would collapse under the weight of its own contradictions and join our rule set.  An amazing vision from that perspective which takes half a century but we actually pull it off.  Along the way, a transformative event  creating the huge disparity between us and the rest of the world.   We move to an all volunteer force.  We professionalize.  We solve the problem that has bedeviled militaries throughout history - how to get the Army to actually cooperate with the Navy.  The creation of the Department of Homeland Security is another transformative event but that is largely an inside job.  We have to locate transformation within the global vision.  We outspend the world on defense.  We’re spending over $450 billion a year.  If all we only want to defend this country, we could do it for about $100 billion per year, I’m certain.  So why are we spending $350 billion dollars  extra? I will argue we are conducting a transaction with the outside world.  We’re selling a product.  The world is buying that product when it buys our debt.  For example, we float 130 billion dollars U.S. treasuries first quarter 2003, 4/5 of it was bought by foreigners.  Two biggest buyers, Japan and China.  Two countries with huge dependencies on Middle Eastern oil.   That was a transaction whether we realize it or not.

You can call that war unilateral but it was actually paid for by somebody else.  If we don’t understand that transaction and don’t understand the service we provide in the course of that transaction, we’re waging war strictly within the context of war and   not understanding it within the context of everything else.  Now one definition of transformation is you have today’s military capabilities and what you are going to do is you’re going to whack off what you don’t need about 5% a year and add on what you do need on the far end.  And in 20 years, you have a new military.  But of course, direction is implied.  You have to know tooth from tail.  You have to have a definition of the future of war.  I will tell you that the dominant definition of future war inside the Pentagon today is the same one we’ve had for about 10 years.  It’s China, Taiwan Straits, 2025.  Why?  It’s a familiar image.  China is big, its bad and it's allegedly communist.  I say we have to find transformation within a larger global vision, a vision that speaks to all these points. 

Now inside the Pentagon, November 2001. I throw those bullets on the wall [14], people would say slow down, you’re getting ahead of yourself.  There is no way all that stuff is on the table.  No way.  Nobody argues any of these bullets anymore because everybody understands they’re all on the table.  All these things are being changed.  In many ways what we are searching for is an understanding of a new definition of the American Way, of not just war, but peace. We have an unprecedented capacity to wage war.    Nobody even comes close.  We do not have nearly the same capacity to wage peace as we’ve seen in Iraq since May of last year.  I will argue that we’ve been exporting security [14.1] around the planet for the last 60 years.  For the biggest chunk of that time period we had a competitor in the process.  If we exported too much to a particular country or region, he would get pissed off.  If he did it, we got pissed off.  He went away in 1990, demand for our services skyrocket.  Here is the best measure I’ve developed working for Hank Gaffney at Simi Corporation as a consultant.  I’m going to talk about combined service crisis response days.  Meaning that if the Navy, Marines. the Air force and the Army all send troops to say Somalia, for 100 days each, I’m going to call that 4 x 100 = 400 cumulative combined crisis response days from the services.. billable hours which I think is the best measure.  Not bombs dropped, billable hours - not just because we value our people more than anything else, but because they cost more than anything else. Here are some numbers, here are some decades.  70’s roughly 10,000 days, not including Viet Nam on-going conflict, so we are focusing on crisis response with some level of combat days, so not humanitarian assistance or disaster relief.  80’s a rough doubling - spiking in interstate war across the system according to the great data from the University of Maryland.    Soviets go away, demand for our services increase 4-5 fold.  Best definition I’ve found of a military under real stress across the 90’s.    How did we deal with that spike?  A variety of ways.  We outsourced to contractors, all the Brown and Roots, we created a new category, military operations other than war. And frankly, we simply denied it, and our denial was dubbed the Powell doctrine - which said that we don’t go into any situation unless we have a clear exit strategy meaning as soon as the guns stop shooting, we are out of there as quickly as possible. I’m going to draw a line here.  Everything below it, basically cats and dogs, you’re going to do this every decade no matter what - like our every decade intervention in Haiti.  General George Barnett, my second cousin, was ousted as commandant of the Marine Corp at the end of the first world war because of excessive force used by the Marines in Haiti.  Some things never change.  Everything above that line is a choice. We decided to go into the Middle East across the 1990’s. Iran, Iraq, the tanker wars, Israel into Lebanon, terrorism. We decided to keep Saddam in a box in a 12-year shooting war across which we dropped bombs almost every single day. We decided to dismember the former republic of Yugoslavia. We decided to engage in so-called massive nation building efforts in Somalia and Haiti. And you can see what kind of job we did in Haiti. What was the actual demand for our services? I would argue it was somewhere north of 250,000 days. This is what we managed. The question we ask is did we use that asset which is the most important asset we have, the time and attention the Defense Department spends on any regions potential or actual instances of mass violence: What did we get for that expenditure?

Now I’m going to give you the core - gap argument from the Esquire article, The Pentagon’s New Map.  Which got me on a lot of television and generated more hate mail than I could possibly read. I’m going to give you a stretching argument: I’m going to say - If we go back to the beginning of the cold war where we had our stuff and where did our business were largely in sync.  Where we had our stuff and did our business in Western Europe.  Think Berlin Crisis.  We had our stuff and we did our business in North East Asia.  Think about McArthur.  Think about Korea, Think about a Bridge Too Far in Viet Nam.  Basic containment strategy.   Box the Soviets in on either side - preserve Japan, preserve Western Europe.  Four key events across the 1970’s shift our attention to the middle of the world.  So the fact that we are trying to transform the Middle East shouldn’t be a surprise because we’ve been trying to do something there positive for roughly 30 years and failing dramatically.  Four key events shove us to that part of the world.  First European détente settles the question of superpower rivalry between us and the Soviets and sends that competition south with the fall of the Portuguese Empire  1975 Sub-Saharan Africa.  The Soviets get countries with socialist orientation, we counter with the Reagan doctrine.  The ‘73 war alerts us to the functioning of the global economy. The rise of OPEC.    The beginnings of oil as a strategic weapon so to speak.  I could show you the crisis response from European Command EUCOM that shifts from one side of the Med to the other across the 1970’s.  The same thing happens on the other side of the earth. Viet Nam ends.  Fall of Shah of Iran.  I could show you the crisis response data from U.S. Pacific Command - shifts from one side of Asia to the other.  We discovered this because we stopped responding to typhoons in the Pacific across the late 1970’s.  And we actually went back and looked at some of the meteorological data to see if there were less typhoons in the Pacific in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s.  The answer was they are always there, same frequency.  Our ships just weren’t around to respond to them in the same degree that they were previous.  So they were the trees falling in the forest with nobody to hear them cause we had shifted to South West Asia.  By the time we create CENTCOM here in the early 1980’s, over 55% of the cumulative combined crisis response days for the four services - inside that red circle (Asia).  For the Navy and Marine Corp, 75%.  Our market had shifted.  Now the Bush administration comes in.  They accuse the Clinton administration of focusing too much on the big pieces of the International Financial Architecture - not paying enough attention to the International Security Architecture - decent argument.  And they come in pretty much decided that China is the long term, near peer competitor - the threat against which we have to size our forces.  There I have the problem with the logic.  In the New Rules Sets work all I did was go between the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and what I heard at the WTC was China - future of integration, future of investment, future of deals.  And then I would go  to the Pentagon and say China - future of danger, threat and war.  Which was why we tried to get these two groups to sit across tables and actually talk to one another. Because the Pentagon’s map and Wall Street’s map overlapped very precipitously in China. 

All that gets wiped off the map with 9-11.  China is a huge beneficiary - a huge beneficiary [15]. I draw a new map on 9-11.  I’m going to use this phrase - functioning.  I’m going to say a country or region is functioning if the following characteristics are roughly met: 1) it welcomes the connectivity and can handle the content flows that come with that connectivity and globalization.  Everybody likes connectivity.  Bin Laden likes connectivity - loves to get on Aljazeera.  Not everybody can handle the content flows.  Good example - Barbie the Doll was kicked out of Iran about 2 years ago.  Barbie had infiltrated Iranian toy stores through the connectivity of global retail.  She began appearing on shelves.    The Mullahs called her Trojan horse of western influence.  They created Sarah, moon faced doll, covered head to toe in black cloth.  Put her next to Barbie on the shelf.  Sarah did not sell like hotcakes so Barbie got a sort of a fatwa issued against her. Detain Barbie wherever you see her was the order.  Barbie became, for all practical purposes, a doll on the run.  You laugh, Saudi Arabia did the same thing the next year.