What I think has to be done - here is my favorite bonehead definition on the future of war from the 1990’s:  Asymmetric - Area denial anti-access strategies - which is the Pentagon’s way of saying that “we’re really huge, anybody we are going to fight is going to be much smaller, they won’t fight us in a straight up fashion, but we can’t say that because people would understand that.  So we call it Area denial anti-access asymmetrical challenges. Why?  Because it’s got a lot of A’s in it apparently. 

Here’s the definition. You’ve got a battle space. You’ve got an enemy embedded within that battle space.  United States is going to try to access that battle space.  They are going to throw up Area denial, anti-access, asymmetrical strategies - banana peel on the tarmac.  They are going to slip computer viruses on our networks.  All of our Achilles heels will be exposed.  This is largely a geographic definition.  It focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict.  Frankly we’re a first quarter team.  We’re like Bill Walsh and the SF 49’ers in the 1980’s.  We have our first 20 scripted plays - we’re just brilliant.  Problem is we don’t adapt well after that. It’s because of the way we think about war.  I will argue there is no battle space we can’t access.  They told us we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it. They told us we couldn’t do Iraq.  There would be 10’s of thousands of deaths.  Not a problem, 150 lost.   What we have trouble accessing over time is the transition space that follows - this huge territory between the end of war and the start of real peace.  What we have trouble accessing are the outcomes that we seek to create.  Very different Asymmetrical anti-access, area denial strategies.  This is not overwhelming force, but proportional force.  It’s not firing live bullets into a crowd of angry women and children in Baghdad.  Why?  Because the minute you do that, the International Red Cross says to you, if you are going to behave like that in public, I can’t be seen with you people in public anymore.   When you lose access to the International Red Cross, your credibility takes a dive. This is not about projecting power but it’s about staying power.  What you lose access to are partners.  17,000 peace keepers we did not get from India.  In this struggle, the assumption is the west is weak and flaccid.  So this is a western struggle against an Islamic world.  That is the way they like to paint it.  Imagine what a different occupation it is if we have 15-20,000 Russians, 15-20,000 Chinese, 15-20,000 Indians.  You say, we’ll never get the Chinese. Who’s energy is going to double?  Who’s energy requirements are going to double in the next 20 years - and where are they going to get it?    Who’s blood, Who’s oil. But we are not making those deals because we are not thinking strategically. So we are going to declare something that we can’t access frankly in a real fashion.  We’re going to declare a political handoff 30 June - fundamentally for presidential election reasons - and that’s too bad.  We have to understand that we are going to fight different people across these spaces.  Until we create a force for these back half situations, we’re not going to score any real victories in this global war on terrorism. 

What we really need and what this  reflects is the lack of an A-Z system for dealing with politically bankrupt states.  What do I mean by that?  An A-Z system - meaning you take a country into A and they come out on Z.  What’s a good example? The International Monetary Fund has a system A-Z system for dealing with an economically bankrupt state.  It’s basically a sovereign Chapter 11.   You go in at A, you come out at Z.  We argue about this rule set incessantly.  But it is basically there.  What we have for dealing politically bankrupt states?  Think about front half, think about back half.  We have the UN Security Council as a grand jury-  I Indict you, I Indict You - I can’t do anything about it, but I Indict You.  We have a Leviathan called the U.S. Military which says in effect, “You want me to take them down?  I’ll take them down”.  And on the far end, we have an International Criminal Court to try these guys.  What we are missing is an executive function to take that indictment and do something with it.  I think that is going to be found in a G7, G8, G20 over time.  Not in the UN Security Council.  What we are missing is the U.S. enabled Sys Admin force as I like to call it.  The back half force that attracts coalition partners because we make clear that we are going to wage peace as effectively as we wage war.   And what we’re missing is what Sebastion Malnoby describes as an International Reconstruction Fund, an IRF like an IMF to deal with the rehabilitation and reconstruction of any regime you decapitate. I will argue though that if the U.S. Military doesn’t create this, this system can’t come into being because until we create this, we won’t get the coalition partners.  When I give this brief abroad to foreign militaries, they tend to jump at the Sys Admin concept as opposed to the Leviathan concept. Because they say, You know what?  We can’t even play with you on big war.  We can’t keep up.  We can barely talk to you but we can do the back half stuff.  A lot of gap countries prefer to do this… why?  They get paid $1100 per soldier, per month by the U.N.  It’s a money maker.  But if we don’t create this capability, this system cannot come into being.   You’ll say you are asking too much of DOD.  I say You created the Internet, you changed the world.  I’ll say, you created GPS, you changed the world.    You created UAV’s, Unmanned aerial vehicles and you have changed the world and you are continuing to change the world.  You create this force, you seed it, you prioritize it, you show me a four-star military police officer and you’ll change the world.  This is why we need to change.

1:34

I’m going to talk about the difference between reality and desire - which is always tricky inside the beltway.  I’m going to talk about the 1990’s, Berlin Wall comes down, Desert Storm - a split emerges inside U.S. Military between those who see a future they can live with and those who see a future they cannot live with.  Good example, U.S. submarine community - looking for somebody to get nervous about.  Office of Naval Intelligence will tell you right now - Chinese are looking 10 feet tall. Why?  Because Osama Bin Laden doesn’t have submarines. Those who don’t see a reality they can live with have moved towards desire over the 1990’s and they have invented a special coded language to describe their journey -  problem is they need a big sexy opponent  to fight against.  If they can’t find one, they will make one up.  Whereas the rest of the military got pulled into the muck, and this muck was described with a very derisive term - called Military Operations Other Than War.  I ask you who joins the military to do things ‘other than war’.  I ask you, Who becomes a four-star admiral general specializing in things ‘Other Than War’ - other than Tony Zinni?  This is Pentagon code for ‘We don’t want to do this’.  We spent the 90’s working the messy scene between the globalizing parts of the world and the non-globalizing parts.  The Clinton Administration was not interested in running the DOD after the fiasco of gays in the military yielding us two of the quietist Secretaries of Defense we’ve ever had.  I don’t even remember their names.  The second guy was really good looking, I remember that.   So we were left home alone across the 1990’s.  What did we do?  We bought one military, we operated another.  It’s like the guy who goes to the doctor and says, Doctor it really hurts when I do this.  Doctor says - stop doing that.  I used to give this brief inside the Pentagon to the Barons inside the Navy - the resource Barons.  I’d come in - it’s like ’93 I’d come in and I’d say you’re buying one Navy and you are operating another and  it’s wrong - it’s just wrong.   They’d say, Dr. Barnett you are so right.  Can you come back next year and remind us again? And I did - for several years in a row.  The patient could not change the self-destructive behavior even though the patient was aware of it.  9-11 heals the rift.  It jerks the transformation gurus out of their long-term fantization about China and says you know what?  Make it good for now.   If you’re going to transform this force I’ve got a reason for you now.  We’ve got a networked opponent.    We need to free up resources because we’re going to elevate this from crap to real grand strategy because that is how we are going to shrink the gap. Some people put these two things together and they call it empire.  They sell a lot of books that way. I think that is a load personally. Empire is about the enforcement of not just minimum rule sets but maximum rule sets.  Not just what you can’t do, but what you must do.  It has never been the American system of governance to do that.  It’s not the way we interact with the outside world.  Our function is one fundamentally of system administration. We only advocate certain minimal rule sets that must be followed in order to remain connected to the global network - the global economy.  Now I’m going to give you a short break - lets reconstitute at 25 after. 

1:38

I’ll take you through definitions of war and conflict.  Then I will take you through some definitions of the system and how we seek to administer it and how we seek to understand the waging war within the context of everything else.  I’m going to give you a classic Royal Dutch Shell methodology - two questions - four outcomes.  What happens to Globalization IV - as I define it 2002 and counting.  The first question, a WHAT question.  How do we define the nature of the struggle?  Is it the best versus the rest - or the west versus the rest?  Basic breakdown arguments.  Tom Friedman - Lexus and the Olive Tree up on top - Sam Huntington, Clash of Civilizations - down below.  Tom Barnett, number 28 on Amazon, the Pentagon’s New Map up on Top, Robert Kaplan  - anything he has ever written, down below.  Robert Kaplan went to West Africa and saw the future of the world.  I said..no, its West Africa.  He went to Los Angeles, got even more scared and wrote another book.  How this comes about.  I talked about that rule set misalignment that develops across the 90’s. Does that persist?  Are we always chasing to catch up with technology and economics in terms of the political and security rule sets.  Or do we actually normalize?  We catch up and everything is back in sync for sometime.   Four possible outcomes.    Worst case, division by culture.  This character flaw in the system remains.  Call that one globalization traumatized.  Can you imagine - the old core turns on itself.  Europeans are from Venus, Americans are from Mars.  The gap only grows - real Robert Kaplan territory.  A division by culture but new rules emerge - at least they are recognized by the old core Japan, Europe and the United States.  The danger is that new cores arise.  So when I see the group of 20 nations plus in the World Trade Organization negotiations as an intermediary between the old core of Europe, the United States and Japan and those negotiations with the gap and I see that that group of 20 plus  that staged the walk-out at Cancun is India, Brazil, China, all the countries I define as the new core, I get worried about that.  I get worried about the fact that we have absolutely no new core powers in the occupation force we have in Iraq now.  Better outcomes - division by competency but we don’t deal with this character flaw.  This is a knee jerk reaction.  Let’s put a fence around these crazy people and let them kill each other. We’ll move on to hydrogen - what would Jesus drive?  Problem is that the gap strikes back on a regular basis in that phenomenon - in that scenario.  You can’t retreat from the world and expect the rest of the world to work out.  They will export their pain and anger in your direction on a regular basis.  Best case outcome.  A division by competency.  New rules emerge.  Call this one globalization normalized.  The core both old and new master 9-11’s which they are going to keep trying until you demonstrate it have no impact.  They will not drive you out of the Middle East and you shrink the gap progressively meaning you take down bad actors militarily and the real integration comes through private sector.  Government tiny role. 

Four elements are put together.  I’ll confess, I’m an economic determinist.  I’ll say that technology is the main driver of history.  If globalization continues to advance - all these good things will happen.  You can attach numbers to most of these in terms of per capita income.   Get them below a certain level and they stop doing a lot of these bad things and they start moving in the direction of these positive things.  But I’ll argue we have to manage carefully four crucial flows within Globalization IV.  Those four crucial flows meaning resources in regions where they are plentiful have to migrate to regions where they are in scarce supply.    The movement of people is a key flow.  The money of energy is a key flow.  The movement of money - long term, foreign direct investments - not flows in and out of stock markets, not commercial bank loans but foreign direct investment - equity ownership.  Finally, the exporting of security which only the United States can do in any appreciable manner. 

Look at migrations first. Focus on populations.  This is a population growth curve. There are some numbers in billions.  Here is some history.  This is where we’ve gone.   When people want to scare the hell out of you, this is what they show you - We’ll all be eating soylent green.   These are the other scenarios.  This is the best bet right now.  Demographers are focusing on this scenario.  What is interesting about this scenario is you get to 2050 - I’ll be 88 years old - starting the second half of my life, you will see us peek as a global population. Absolute turning point in human history.  After that point, we being to depopulate as a species.  Great article not too long ago - New York Times - Sunday.  China, the most populace country facing a population shortage.  They are going to age more rapidly than any country in human history - meaning they are more likely to get old before they get rich.  Why is this important to us? Six billion now - this is the spread now.  We love these guys because they work.  We’ve got more coming in than coming out in this equation.  We are going to have an equaling of young versus old 2050 and from that point on, the old are going to outnumber the young.  Absolutely amazing.  Shouldn’t happen in nature. The wolves should hunt us down and kill us in large enough numbers.  By extension, why this matters to all of us.  I like to say, I should be worrying about my PSR, I tend to worry about my PSA, but I should be worrying about my PSR.  Why because I’m only 41 and I can still do something about - or let me say, my wife can still do something about it. 

PSR - Potential Support Ratio.  Every working person for everybody in retirement.   This is global history.  In 1950 the number was 12 to1 - still pretty rural and agrarian.   With Globalization II it gets you down to 9 to 1, Why?  Most of the world hadn’t joined globalization till very near the end of the process of the century.   This is what happens when you get an old and a new core coming together and 2/3 of humanity are deeply integrating in a global economy.   That number comes down over the next 5 decades very dramatically.  Now a lot of assumptions in here.  Major organization.  Huge upticks in technological productivity.  People living longer and working longer.  But you ask yourself, how are you going to manage that global PSR of 4 to 1 in 2050?  What can come along and knock that baby off its pedestal.  What can come along is a fix already in the works.  We can track it and we can predict it with great accuracy.  We distinguish between the old core, the new core and the gap.      PSR’s across these 3 groups - dramatically different.  2 to 1 in the old core, 5 to 1 in the new core, still 10 to 1 here.   Above replacement rate here in the 50 poorest countries in 2050.  So no great mystery.  You’ve got to get people to move from the right to the left.  Not just into the old core, but frankly into the new core too.  And you’ve going to have to see a lot of jobs move in this direction. The politically sensitive issue of outsourcing.  Third alternative - a very interesting one - a global commute.  My favorite example covered in Wired magazine last year.  In the Philippines, one tenth of its working age population works overseas - and the government encourages this.  They give them special holidays, free medical care, special communications and special rates on travel.  What does it sound like?  It sounds like how  we get the U.S. military to be the largest global commuting force on the planet.  Why is that no surprise? The Philippino’s learned it from us.  The original stewards on the ships.  Right now they have 2 million workers in the United States - annual basis, they take out 3 billion dollars - quadruple that number and you get the actual impact on the Philippino economy - multiplier effect.  What Hispanics of Latin America send back to Latin America is six times what the core gives it in foreign aid and that’s keeping 95% of the money they earn here - here.  They only send 5% back and it is six times the aid that the core sends to Latin America.  This is enormously important.  And again, all the things they use in the system to make this happen, are the things that we’re putting under attack after 9-11 - the ability to travel freely, the ability to communicate freely, the ability to move money as freely as possible.