Good example, Reason, Libertarian magazine, June issue sent out to all 40,000 subscribers, on the cover of each issue overhead satellite photo of the neighborhood of the subscriber with their house circled and the title on the front of the magazine, ‘We Know Where You Live John Smith’.  That’s connectivity in the core in its most amazing format.  The opposite of that, we can’t find Bin Laden in Northwest Pakistan because he is living in a hole in the ground.  We’ve got to get more SOF fighters - Special Operations Forces.  If it is a war against super-empowered individuals, everybody we put on the ground, in the air or on the sea has to be super-empowered which gives interesting possibilities for small nations in terms of coalitions.  We shift from big bases to smaller bases - that is Andy Hoehn’s work in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. And here is the part that I think the retired flags on Fox didn’t get, during the last war in Iraq.  We’ve spent a lot of money on strategic speed across the 90’s.  I think it is the wrong way to think about speed because I don’t think we ever go to war quickly.  I differentiate between tactical speed that is an obvious good because it gets our service men and women home at the end of the day, alive in one piece. Differentiate from that and operational speed which I like to call net-centric warfare’s Wayne Gretsky speed. Wayne Gretsky, greatest hockey player in history in the NHL.  He was asked, why are you so good, you’re not the fastest skater.  He said, “I don’t skate to where the puck is, I skate to where it will be”.  That’s common operational picture.  That’s speed of command. That’s synchronicity.  That’s moving bytes more than bullets. [22] 

Last point, strategic tempo should never be about speed in this country.  Nobody likes a rash hyper-power.  We never engage in war quickly.  Never.  Iraq invades Kuwait, we respond rapidly - re-invading Kuwait about 8 months later.  Why?  Because we are a democracy.  We debate war like crazy - before, during and after.  And that is not going to change. Nobody wants us to engage in war quickly.  Instead, our strategic tempo should highlight inevitability.  It is the ultimate psy-op.  We told Saddam cut it out.  No really, cut it out. We’re coming in about six months.  We’re coming in four months - 2 months.  We’re coming next week.  We’re coming Tuesday morning.   When we got there he didn’t want to fight.  They were all gone.  Why?  Because nobody wants to fight the U.S. military.  We can’t find anybody even willing to fly planes against us anymore.  That is the disparity between us and them in actual war.  A very different disparity than the peacekeeping as we discover - that this is existential dissuasion.  It tells the world, if you really want to break rules.  If you really want to be rogue nation, this is what you are going to get.   And we can do it with ease.   What we have not demonstrated is that we can do the back half work.  Here is my mantra.  Disconnectedness defines danger.  It has to change the way we think about intelligence.  Intelligence community frankly, it’s like the drunk looking for his car keys under the street lamp even though his car is parked two blocks away - because the light is better over here.      We don’t know anything about the gap.  We don’t have the intelligence networks for it. [23] It is absolutely embarrassing.  That’s why we get such amazing calls wrong - like Did Libya get far in its WMD?  How far was Iraq?  What do we really know about North Korea - almost nothing.  That has to change.  Increasingly we have to reorient not just the intelligence community, but the way we think about war to the gap.  Does it mean we never hedge against China in the future?  Absolutely not.   Does it mean the vast bulk of our resources and imagination should be focused on what I would describe as the absolute failure of U.S. National Security 25 years from now at $450 billion dollars a year?  NO.  I think we have to spend money to create success every year between now and 2025.  I think we can do that and maintain a certain hedge against China invading Taiwan.

A new definition of crisis to go with this new map of the world.   I’m going to explain what I mean by this new definition of crisis by telling you how I was educated as a young Political Military Analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses at the end of the cold war.  I’m going to differentiate between what I call vertical and horizontal scenarios.  When I became to C N A, I was taught to think about surprise, strategic surprise as strictly a vertical scenario, definition of change and real danger - a vertical scenario.  What do I mean by this classic cold war definition of a vertical scenario?  It unfolds with lightening speed, It’s always a bolt from the blue.  The opponents were conveniently known beforehand in the cold war - so were our allies.  Strategy and battle plans published in thick volumes up on the shelves - we practiced them day and night.  Tom Clancy made a fortune writing about them. Single hand of poker.  No evolutions or change.  You couldn’t be Poland in the middle of world war III (he said III but I think that was a mistake) and say “hey, you know what?  I’d like to reconsider”.  Static timeframe.   You’re going to fight the war.  The world remains frozen in place. Not a lot of good global economic histories in the second world war.  Why?  Because there was none.  It was a global war.  Everything froze in place.  Then you figured out who the losers were on the far end and you took away their stuff.   This is a highly idealized definition of WWI and WWII.  

WWI fight it out in Europe, take away the loser’s empires.  WWII draw a line though Europe Soviets get half, we get half.  World War III, delayed gratification, wall comes down, we go into Russia and loot it for everything we can.  Classics of this genre the Fulda Gap which never happened and the mini-mean version, the DMZ which we still have.  And my problem with this education was I never actually experienced it across my career - this definition of crisis.    Instead, I experienced cognitive dissonance.  I kept looking at the world trying to make my mental models fit it. What we saw across the post-cold war era, something very different.  Eventually I came to dub it the post-cold war horizontal scenario.  This thing that goes up and down, up and down forever and ever.  My definitions of this - no clear beginning or end - drags on forever.  Can anybody name the year the Balkans crisis began?  1390… something.  Definition of enemy changes over time.   We go into Somalia - at first it was famine, then it was lack of governance, then it was warlords, then it was that one warlord, then we get a bunch of guys killed and we decide it’s really the U.N. that was the problem so we get the hell out of Dodge.  Allies come and go, not just the French.  Coalitions - its almost like festival seating.  Strategy evolves.  Strikes - not battles.   Definition of the problem depends on what Op-Ed you are reading that morning. In fact, on a good morning you can find two or three - on the same page. The world goes on.  Meanwhile you are babysitting some crappy situation seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  

Two classics of this genre Fighting Monty Python’s Black Knight, Milosevic , lopping off limbs of his body politic as he idiotically taunts us and dares us to fight on.  He sits limbless in the docket spitting at us still.  His trial goes on for another year or so.   And then keeping Saddam in the box for about 12 years. What did you get with that?  You made the Europeans a little happier.  You kept oil stable coming out of the middle east.  You let globalization and the go-go 90’s Go-Go because you went-went there.  No circle for this.  Between AIDS and all the deaths from conflict, roughly a holocaust here, roughly a holocaust.  Roughly 6 - 7 million.  Doesn’t appear on anybody’s maps -certainly not on the Pentagon’s maps.  Page 23 NY Times.  Nobody cares because nothing comes out of there that we fear enough or value enough to make the effort on.  I put these two together and I describe what I call a system perturbation. A shock to the system that alters rule sets.   I’m going to talk about Pain and I’m going to talk about Time - sort of the meaning of life.   I’m going to say a system perturbation begins with a vertical shock  followed by any number of horizontal tails.  I’ll throw up four here illustratively.  Vertical shock:  obvious 9-11.  Some of the horizontal tails, what happened to the airline industries.  What happened to the financial sector.  The anthrax scare - fellow traveler or not - I don’t care.  Pathway dependency - and the immediate horizontal tail called Afghanistan.    Some of the tails that come off the original tails - what happens to the airline industry - happens to the tourist industry all over the world - damages dramatically the Egyptian economy within weeks.  Damages the Israeli economy - by extension, the West Bank economy because at that point a lot of day laborers coming across the line backfilling service economy jobs so violence in the Middle East goes up - part of Bin Laden’s plan?  Absolutely. 

What happens to the financial sectors - happens to the insurance industry - happens to the re-insurance industry if you follow that interesting tail.  Spills over into the airline insurance industry so you see the merging of these horizontal scenarios.  With anthrax we get this interesting tail called the breakthrough on AIDS drugs patent relief around the world - helps launch the Doha Development Round.  Part of Bin Laden’s secret plan?  I don’t think so - making AIDS drugs cheaper across sub-Saharan Africa? Yet, it is an interesting line.  9-11 happens. Anthrax guy or gal strikes, 5 dead, 13 sick in the United States.  At that point, Canada, normally a wonderful rule set follower, tells Bayer, the German giant pharmaceutical we’re going to break your patent on Cipro, we’re going to crank it generically here in Canada, you’re not going to get a dime, we’re going to call it a national emergency.  Charles Schumer U.S. Senator from New York says we should do the same thing.  Bush Administration kind of whispers across the Atlantic, “We don’t think we need to do it AT THIS TIME”.  Bayer catches the hint.  Turns on every factory it has in the world 24/7, cranks out Cipro at an unprecedented rate, floods the market at a cut-rate costs.   At that point, figuratively at the back of the room, sub-Saharan African nations raise their hands and they say, “How do you people do that with a straight face?”  We’ve been asking for AIDS drugs patent relief because millions are dying across sub-Saharan Africa. You say, “It’s complex.  Shareholder’s expectations, R&D, patent copyright.  Wish I could help.” You get 5 dead, 13 sick and you re-write the rules in one afternoon.   Sub-Saharan African nations threaten to derail the launching of the Doha Development Round  being held in Qatar November 2001.  They hoped to launch the development round in Seattle in 1999 but Seattle-Man took care of that. So the powers that be were very intent on showing the world that Bin Laden does not derail the WTO. Sub-Saharan African nations are going to derail it on the basis of their anger over the intransigence of the old core on AIDS drugs patent relief.  Bob Zoellick, U.S. Trade Representative steps to the fore, cuts the deal, Doha Development round was launched.

A lot of back and forth since then, but one of the upsides of this whole strain is that you are going to have cheaper AIDS drugs through the Gap. It’s interesting, soon after that gets announced, China says, you know what, we have a very serious AIDS problem and decides they’re going to start breaking patents all throughout China on creating AIDS cocktail drugs.  Absolutely an amazing story which talks about the unintended consequences.