The right to a secret
ballot is the cornerstone of our democracy. For centuries, Americans –
regardless of their race, creed, or gender – have fought for the right
to vote…and the right to keep that vote to themselves. Now, just months
after the new Democrat majority was elected in 435 separate, private
ballot elections, it is preparing to strip men and women of their right
to a private ballot in the workplace. What could be more undemocratic
than that?
This week, House Democrat leaders will bring up for debate legislation – the cleverly-entitled Employee Free Choice Act
– that would kill private voting rights in union organizing elections
and make employees’ votes public through what’s known as a “card
check.” In card check campaigns, union bosses gather authorization
cards purportedly signed by workers expressing their desire for a union
to represent them – a process that notoriously leaves workers open to
coercion, pressure, and outright intimidation.
Such an instance of intimidation was highlighted in testimony
provided earlier this month to a U.S. House labor subcommittee by Karen
M. (to protect her identity, she chose not to provide her full last
name), an employee who described tactics used in a card check campaign
at her company in Oregon. During that card check drive, she told us
that she and her colleagues were “subjected to badgering and immense
peer pressure” and that she “exercised [her] free choice not to be in
the union and [her] work life became miserable because of it.” Frankly,
hers is one of the tamer stories we’ve heard.
What’s particularly amazing, however, is that even sponsors of
the card check bill admit the process is inherently prone to just the
type of intimidation Karen described in her testimony. Writing to
Mexican – yes, Mexican – officials in August 2001 in advance of an
election between two competing labor unions in that country, 16 House
Democrats – 11 of whom remain in the House and sponsor the card check
bill – plainly stated, “We feel that the secret ballot is absolutely
necessary in order to ensure workers are not intimidated into voting
for a union they may otherwise not choose.”
That’s right. Not only do card check supporters seem to be
supporting rights for Mexican workers that they aren’t even willing to
protect for their own constituents, but they also have admitted that
the same card check process they romanticize as a better alternative to
the secret ballot is, in fact, flawed. So, let’s be clear. No matter where they’re conducted – the
United States, Mexico, or anywhere else – and regardless of the
circumstances – whether between two unions or in a single union
recognition campaign – the fact remains that, in the best case, card
check campaigns expose a worker’s private vote for everyone to see…and,
in the worst case, they leave workers wide open to intimidation,
coercion, and threats.
So, if it’s not to protect workers, what is the real reason for the card check bill? Two words: desperation and power.
Union membership is in sharp decline – down to 12 percent nationwide
and seven percent in the private sector. And that trend isn’t showing
any signs of reversing.
That is, unless something dramatic occurs.
And that’s where the so-called Employee Free Choice Act
comes into play. It gives Big Labor and the Democrats they helped elect
one last, best shot at reversing their flagging fortunes. Will it work?
Probably not this time around. The bill is likely to stall in the
Senate, and President Bush already has pledged a veto should it get
that far. But is it a wake-up call for all of us? Absolutely. House
Democrats this week are poised to begin chiseling away at democracy in
the workplace, and if they’re willing to do something so brash this
early in the new Congress, you can’t help but ask, “what’s next?”
Chiseling away at democracy
By John Kline
Monday, February 26, 2007
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi smiles before speaking at a news
conference in support of the Employee Free Choice Act at the Labor
Council in San Francisco, Wednesday, Feb. 21, 2007. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
HH: I am now joined by Dr. Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of The Pentagon’s New Map,
one of the most important books within the Pentagon and outside of it
in many circles in the last few years. Dr. Barnett and I are spending
an hour a week going through this book. We are on Chapter 6. Dr.
Barnett, welcome back. You’re in the District of Columbia tonight? TB: Yes, I am, in a cab heading toward the hotel. HH: Well, we’ll do the best we can, and we’ll make it work. As I read Chapter 6, The Global Transaction Strategy… TB: Right. HH: I think it’s an eloquent and a persuasive argument on the
necessity and indeed the morality of projection of the two American
militaries, the leviathan and the system administrator into those
conflicts around the world that threaten the gap’s growing
connectivity. And I know we’ve got to unpack that for people. TB: Right. HH: Before I do that, though, because I think it matters, we’ve
never talked politics. And since you’re making a Wilsonian argument
here, I’d like to kind of get on the record…you’re a Catholic kid, grew
up in Wisconsin, a Harvard PhD, and if my e-mailers are correct, you
were a supporter of John Kerry in ’04? TB: Yes. HH: And are you a Democrat? TB: Registered, yes. HH: And have you always supported Democrats? I think this is
important for people to understand that we’re going to agree a lot in
this chapter, and I want them to understand you’re a Democrat. TB: I guess I’d call myself a conservative Democrat, or sort of a
Tony Blair, Scoop Jackson sort of Democrat. So pretty much a hawk
externally, and pretty much a Democrat internally. HH: Would you agree that you’re a pragmatic Wilsonian, if we have to come up with sort of categories to put you in? TB: Yeah, pragmatic Wilsonian, kind of an idealist/realist. I hate
the binary choices. You know, when I was over in China the first time,
they said you’ll never be accepted in America, because in America, they
always want you to be either one or the other. And you’re very
pragmatic in your short term analysis, but very idealistic in your long
term analysis, and that’s a tough balance to maintain. HH: How have you earned the trust of the uniforms, not being a veteran yourself? TB: Well, you know, I don’t talk about things I don’t know, and I’m
not asked to advise them on things that I don’t understand. I’m a grand
strategist, and my role has always been about helping the military to
understand the larger context, the whys and the whens and the whos of
conflict, but not the how. I leave the how completely to them, so they
don’t come to me, for example, for tactics or operations. They come to
me for insights about under what conditions they’ll wage war, and for
what reasons. HH: You know, Dr. Barnett, I find it very encouraging, though, that
the uniform services are open to a civilian of your background and
writing, coming in and talking about those things, and don’t
automatically say he hadn’t been there, he hadn’t done that, he can’t
possibly project how force is going to be necessary and used in the
decades ahead. TB: Well again, it’s the role I play. I help them understand the
larger world they’re operating within. I don’t tell them how to suck
eggs, as they say in the military. I don’t tell them stuff they already
know, or they know better than I. I focus on what they don’t know as
well as I do, and by keeping myself in that niche, and by working with
the military across a 17 year career, and sticking with it, and dealing
with very, very tough audiences day after day after day, which is why
when I get this sort of criticism, you know, Barnett’s in the ivory
tower, Barnett’s detached from reality, Barnett’s never faced tough
audiences, you know, I get up in front of four stars and three stars
all the time. I face plenty of tough audiences, very demanding
audiences, people who demand very real answers. HH: I want to go to the double imperative that you were talking
about, but I want to do that after bringing up one of those exchanges
you had with an Admiral Tom Weschler, who was at the Naval War College,
and says you’ve explained this gap, and you’ve explained this new form
of crisis, I’m on board, I want to shrink your gap and get better at
dealing with your system perturbations. My question is, what do we get
in return for doing all these difficult things? Dr. Barnett, what do we
get in return for doing all these difficult things? TB: What we get is the end of war as we’ve known it. Classic state
on state war basically goes away, and if we’re persistent enough in
dealing with these largely internal or civil sources of strife, we
basically get peace on the planet, which is completely within our
wherewithal, because if you imagine all the money that my core, all
these advanced powers of the West, and now the East, spend on preparing
for war with each other, you think about all the foreign aid these
countries give, all the money they pour into these gap countries,
post-conflict, if you looked at that entire pool of money, do we have
the resources, do we have the manpower? Absolutely. And we have the
overlapping security interests. We all want safe, secure access to raw
materials coming outside of the gap, and we all want a more peaceful
planet. HH: All right. Now let’s get to the specifics of Chapter 6. The
moral imperative of American intervention, we can and we must, because
we can and no one else can. Is that a fair summary? TB: Yes, in the sense that we’re the only military power in the
world that can go someplace and be someplace and sustain itself and
operate distant from our shores. Nobody even comes close to that. So if
we don’t show up, basically nobody shows up. There are a lot of myths
out there that other countries can wage war distant from their shores.
They cannot. There’s a myth that the U.N. can step in and replace us.
It cannot. If we don’t show up, the unspoken power of our leviathan
force is, we basically decide when not only we wage war, but if and
when other countries wage war. Any war on this planet is basically with
our okay, because we’re the one country on the planet that can
basically stop it, and that is a tremendous moral power that we wield.
It’s an unspoken power. It’s not one we easily address, but when people
accuse us of doing nothing in Sudan, and the only reason they can
accuse America of something like that is because we’re the only country
that if we want to, we can basically stop Sudan. HH: And so, when you argue that we are under an obligation to use
force when we can in the priorities that you organize here, it’s a
moral argument about our not acting in the face of evil TB: Absolutely. The peril here is, I mean, look at the last time we
really engaged in serious isolationism, right after another big bout,
the first great bout of globalization. That was waged under the guise
of the colonial powers, you know, 1870, roughly, to 1914. We backed off
from that world, and that thing fell apart. That globalization
self-immolated, and we basically took all that connectivity and drove
it back to zero, put our planet through a massive world war, 100
million dead, and we could have prevented that with a more
interventionary, activist foreign policy. I don’t want to go down that
path again, because I don’t believe that the effort we made on the Cold
War basically ended everything. It ended the conflict among the great
powers, but there’s still roughly one third of humanity, my so-called
non-integrating gap, that has its noses pressed to the glass, wondering
when they’re going to get into this party called globalization, and
this poverty reduction program that’s unprecedented in global history.
And until we let them in, they’re going to be a constant source of
danger not only to ourselves, but largely to themselves. We estimate
maybe 13 million people have died inside my gap since the end of the
Cold War. Much of it could have been prevented. I mean, that’s a couple
of holocausts on our watch that we need to care about, because we need
to identify our definitions of national security with a global
definition of international stability. We had that in the Cold War. It
was called mutual assured destruction. Our basic rationale was you
attack America, by God, I’ll blow this planet up, okay, and that’s how
we threatened the world, and made the world inherently interested not
only in our security, but in the planet’s stability. That connection
between America’s national security and international stability is
gone. Bin Laden kills a million tomorrow inside Chicago, I say quick,
name the country we can bomb in retaliation, because if you can’t name
that country now, I can’t threaten them in advance. And if I can’t
threaten them in advance, I don’t have deterrence, and we’ve lost the
link between U.S. security and international stability. HH: I want to go back to the comment you just made, 13 million dead
since the end of the Cold War, a couple of holocausts on our watch. Are
you saying, Dr. Barnett, that because we could have stopped that, we
ought to have stopped that? TB: I’m saying if we can do anything, we have to do something. I
mean, the slippery slope argument that says I can’t save them all,
therefore I save none, is not just good enough in this day and age. I
mean, it was good enough across the 90’s when we had the go-go 90’s,
and we said Powell doctrine limits our interest in doing the post-war,
so we just round up bad guys and come back as quickly as possible. But
as events have unfolded and been proven time and time again, where we
don’t fix things, we have to go back. And in between our visits, lots
of death occurs. So where we have the most egregious instances of
violence and civil strife and genocide, where we have any ability to
motivate ourselves, and to motivate others into action, I say it’s our
responsibility to do something, because to say we can’t do everything
is not an excuse for doing nothing. HH: There’s a second imperative in addition to the moral imperative.
We’ve got about a minute to the break. It’s that there’s a pragmatic,
self-interest here. If we take holidays from history, as we did in the
20’s and the 90’s, the costs are too high, not just in dead people
around the globe, but here in the United States. TB: Well, absolutely. And you know, the more positive spin on this
is the more we extend our networks, the more we extend globalization,
and the transparency that comes with it, the safer we are. There was a
famous statement by Catherine the Great that Bob Kagan quotes in his
new book, Dangerous Nation, which is a brilliant book. Catherine the
Great said of Russia’s borders, I can’t defend them, so I must extend
them. And that’s almost the way we need to think about globalization.
Our security, the security of our network called the United States,
it’s only as good as every other nation to which we connect in this
process called globalization. So it’s safer for us to extend our
networks to put that kind of instability and danger more distant from
our show, then to firewall ourselves off from it and pretend we can
stop things at the border. - - - - HH: Dr. Barnett, you describe the United States as globalization’s bodyguard. Can you expand on that a little bit? TB: Well, I think we have to understand that basically, we’re
globalization’s source code. Our country, in terms of the model we
represent, as an economic and political union, really gives rise to the
sort of model of globalization that comes out from the experience of
the Second World War, after that colonial globalization model of the
Europeans kind of self destructed in a massive civil war that raged
over 1914-1945. Our model of globalization, transparency, collective
security, free trade, free markets, a kind of a leviathan over all of
us in the form of the federal government, that’s the role that in
effect, we walk into after the Second World War. So we played bodyguard
to globalization’s spread around the planet. It doesn’t mean that we’re
the ruler. I like to say globalization comes with rules, but not a
ruler. So we have to understand the limitations of that, and we have to
understand that our application of military force needs to be
contextualized within some larger rule set, that we get the rest of the
advanced powers of the world, not everybody on the planet, not every
Podunk country, but the big powers need to agree upon so that we
understand collectively under what conditions it makes sense for us to
wage war, and we’re not going off doing things others can’t support. HH: Now you posed the question which I’m sure many
anti-interventionists are having, are forming as they yell at the
radio. Quote from Page 301: “What gives America the right to render
judgment of right and wrong, or good versus rogue? If America takes on
the worst offenders in order to extend the core’s rule sets, then why
not take on all offenders? Why not just admit we run an empire?” Why
not, Dr. Barnett? TB: Well, because an empire is about enforcing maximal rule sets,
what you must do. And what we do is we enforce minimal rule sets.
That’s the nature of our political system, you know, what’s not written
into law is everything you can do. That’s different from other parts of
the world. I remember being almost arrested in the Soviet Union in 1984
for playing Frisbee in a park, and the cop came up to me and said
that’s against the law. And I said where is it written, and he said
buddy, it’s not written that you can play Frisbee in a park. And that’s
how most of the world is governed. But our system has always been based
on the notion that if it’s not written down as prohibited, then it’s
basically fair game. And that’s the way we’ve ruled the world, if you
want to call it that, as we basically enforced minimal rule sets,
certain bad things that you must refrain from, so that we can have a
relatively stable and free flow of commerce around the planet. You
know, the most minimal rule set we’ve pursued throughout our history,
and it’s the reason why we had a Navy all these years, is simple
freedom of the sea, because in the global economy right up the Second
World War, that was basically the only rule you needed. Just keep the
fees free, and global commerce can move effectively. But it’s a lot
more complex now. I mean, it’s not just sea travel, it’s air travel,
it’s networks, it’s all sorts of connectivity that we can barely
control, much less understand, and it just behooves us to understand
that our role has expanded, and yet we’re not an empire. We don’t seek
political control over places. We don’t seek to enforce maximal rules.
We seek to keep a level playing field. And others like us in that role.
That’s why nobody’s built a force to counter us over the last 17 years,
despite all those predictions from realists that it was inevitable. HH: But it seems to me to make that work, we need to have one
certain confidence, and I remember after giving a lecture a few years
ago, an exchange student from Asia approached me upset. They said you
believe that the West is best. And I looked at him and said yes. And it
seems to me, Dr. Barnett, so do you. TB: I do, but I like to put it in a different way, not so much in
terms of we’re better. You know, I think we’re there first. I think
we’re there earlier. You know, I talk about America being the source
code for globalization. It doesn’t make us right in all instances. It
means in terms of that journey towards an integrating, fair sort of
environment, you know, bound by rules and bound by a certain culture of
tolerance and acceptability of others and their differences, we’re
further along in that process, and it creates tremendous
responsibility, that wisdom and that understanding. But it doesn’t give
us the right to abrogate the rights of others. We have to be patient in
many ways, and understand that as other countries make that journey in
a similar direction, their change will come at a pace that their
culture will handle, which is why… HH: But we still need to…but do we not have to recognize that what
we are exporting, slowly or rapidly, generously or not so generously,
coercively when necessary against a bad guy, or not coercively when
simply pushing those borders out, is nevertheless a premise that how we
organize things is in fact best. TB: And is organized by rules, okay? And our rule set has come about
with many clashes across our history, the most famous one being the
Civil War. So I mean…and we constantly adapt our rule sets. Our legal
system, our Supreme Court is on a daily basis, almost, declaring
certain rules invalid, and asking Congress or the President to come up
with better ones. So it’s a constant evaluation process that keeps us
strong, not some inherent cultural superiority. It’s that we are an
amalgamous, synthetic culture of many rules that have been time tested
and put to use over time, and give us a confidence in their efficacy.
And again, that’s a responsibility to help others understand that
pathway, not to lord it over them, and certainly not to give people the
appearance of empire, but to give people a sense that we’re there when
they need us, and we’re the force that shows up time and time again. HH: But what I’m driving at, Dr., is that we have confidence of an efficacy, and in its universality… TB: Sure. HH: …because I’ve often heard the argument that the Arab peoples
just aren’t cut out for this kind of globalization, and I think that’s
profoundly wrong and immoral, and I think you do as well. TB: Well, because I heard the same thing about other people in the past. HH: Exactly. TB: I heard the Japanese couldn’t do it, and they did. In fact,
they’re almost better at it than we are in some ways, thanks to our
efforts and our willingness to go and fight and stay. And that’s the
key part. Any…you know, any kind of empire in the world can go and
fight. But we’re the ones who go and fight and stay long enough for the
stability and the security and the peace to ensue, so I absolutely
disagree with the notion that anybody’s genetically defective. It
didn’t take the Russians that long to adjust, and it certainly didn’t
take the Chinese that long to become as capitalistic or more
capitalistic than we are. HH: Of course, we don’t always stay. We didn’t stay in Vietnam, and
holocaust followed. We did not stay, people don’t want us to stay in
Iraq. We did not stay in Lebanon in 1983. And the dangers of not
staying, what you call drive-by regime change, are exponentially higher
now than even in the holocaust era of South Vietnam and Cambodia, Dr.
Barnett. I think that’s your conclusion. TB: Yes, I’d give a slightly different take on history. I say we
went to Europe and we stayed, and now Europe is peaceful and safe. I
say we went to the Berlin Wall, and we instituted the policy of
containment, and we stayed. And eventually, 3 billion new capitalists
joined our system. I’d say we went to Vietnam, and we fought a bloody
war, and we retreated into an off-shore balancing role that was
profound over the last thirty years, that was a key input to the Asian
miracle, because it allowed countries there to basically focus on
economic development, and not be constantly hedging against one another
militarily. And that’s a collective good we supply the world, which I
argue the world has paid for fairly effectively by keeping our currency
as the global currency, and in effect, financing a lifestyle, plus that
military obligation that we would otherwise not be able to afford. HH: That’s the essential transaction. - - - - HH: Dr. Barnett, part of your warning in Chapter 6, a precipitous
withdrawal from when we are engaged with the gap was echoed, or
actually anticipated by John Burns, New York Times correspondent, just
back from Baghdad in a conversation I had with him Friday. I’d like
your reaction to is prediction about the effects of a precipitous
withdrawal. Here is John Burns from Friday: JB: If the United Nations is correct in saying that 3,700 Iraqi
civilians died in October, and that’s a morgue’s count, it may be an
underestimate, we don’t know. But he said if it’s correct that 3,700
people died in October across Iraq, he said think about this. You take
the American troops away in this situation, leaving Shiite death squads
to move into Adamiya in force, without any kind of protection, he said
it won’t be 3,700 dead in a month. It’ll be 3,700 dead in the night in
Adamiya. HH: Do you agree with that sort of an assessment, Dr. Barnett? TB: I agree with it with regard to Iraq, and I would make the
argument for the gap in general, that Iraq represents in many ways just
a microcosm of the sort of long terms dangers that would ensue if
America withdrew from the world, that eventually, you would see other
countries have to step up, other great powers like China and Russia and
Europe, to protect their interests, to pick proxies to wage their wars,
and to slowly but surely pull us into conflict on a much broader scale
than what we have to engage in when we do something like Iraq. It’s
hard for us to remember in terms of the scope of our effort in the
past. I mean, we’ve put just a phenomenal chunk, like one third of our
GDP, to make World War II happen. And our percentage burden of GDP
across the Cold War steadily decreased. It was about 10% in the 50’s,
down to 9% in the 60’s, down to 6% in the 70’s and 80’s, and in the
post-Cold War era, down to about 4%. So we’re spending as a percentage
of GDP about half of what we spent during the Cold War. And if you
think about it in terms of the burden of our troops abroad, we have
368,000 troops abroad now, out of a country of 300 million. That means
about one out of every 800 Americans serves abroad. You go back to the
height of the Cold War, 1968, our efforts in Vietnam, we had one out of
every 200, not one out of every 800, but one out of every 200 Americans
serving abroad. So when you look at that sort of effort, which is
decreasing over time, and you compare that effort to other efforts we
made historically, what we have gotten for this effort in the post-Cold
War era is absolutely phenomenal. We’ve helped engineer a reduction of
poverty around the planet, and we’re down to cracking some of the
toughest nuts, and really are living in a world more peaceful than it’s
ever been, with a global economy that’s more expansive than it’s every
been. So for sacrifice to gain ratio, this is a pretty tremendous gift
we’re giving the world. It doesn’t negate whatsoever the sacrifice of
individuals, or the families involved. It is a very profound thing. I
worries a lot…I’ve had three nephews serve already, and I worry about
two of them going back very, very soon. But in the grand scheme of
things, this is a pretty great generation that we’re putting forward,
and I think we need to be pretty proud of that fact, and understand
that we’re really providing the world a lot more than anybody else is,
but we enjoy the world’s stability as much or more than anybody else
does. HH: Now a key recognition in this chapter, I think it’s profound,
actually, is that we need connectivity, because it guarantees our
safety, and it is a moral choice that we’ve got to make, but you can’t
buy connectivity with enough expenditure of treasure. Some of the
world’s bad guys aren’t for sale, or if they are, they won’t stay
bought. Now how understood is that…I mean, it’s obvious to me, it seems
obvious to you, but I don’t think a lot of people on the center-left
buy that, Dr. Barnett. TB: Well, I think…I don’t think a lot of people in…maybe in some
parts of our military buy it, either. I mean, I think that idea is
bought off by the Marines and the Army, and the SOF guys, the Special
Operations guys. I think it’s bought off by our military far more than
our civilian world. I think it’s bought off by our government more than
it is our public, but I think it’s a matter of us understanding,
increasingly over time, this is a story we have to tell and make clear
to people. It’s not as sexy, and it’s not as obvious, and it’s not as
binary as the Cold War. It says that when we make this effort, we make
good things happen for everybody, and we generally benefit more than
the rest, so it’s in our self-interests, it’s in our secure interests
to make sure these networks extend, and as connectivity ensues, there’s
a moral obligation here to invite those one third of humanity that are
noses pressed to the glass… HH: But sometimes, it takes force. But sometimes, it takes force. TB: Sometimes it takes force, because there are always going to be
elements who make the offer that dictators make throughout history,
which is just give me these people, and I’ll leave you alone. Just let
me have these people to do with what I will, and I’ll leave you alone.
And there’s an obligation when you know…when the neighbor in your
apartment building keeps their 5 year old kid locked up in a closet,
and when they open the door six years later, it looks like a 4 year old
instead of a 12 year old, that’s some of the suffering we find in
countries like North Korea, and places like Iraq and other situations
where dictators have ruled for decades. - - - - HH: Dr. Barnett, I’m going to just sort of sit back here and let you
explain what I think is a very complicated subject on the bifurcation
and evolution of the American military that you think has to happen
into a leviathan set of forces, and a system administration set of
forces, their different jobs, and how that happens. TB: Yeah, and I don’t make this argument that this is something
that’s going to happen in the future. I think it’s been happening for
quite some time. I think it’s a natural kind of evolution that’s been
going on inside the U.S. military since the end of the Cold War, when
we’ve really kind of returned to society, and kind of moved off that
abstract model of global Armageddon that kind of dominated our thinking
in the Cold War. And if you think about it, this is the course of our
history. I mean, we always had a Department of War called the Army, to
wage war, but we always had a department of what I like to call
everything else, otherwise known as the Navy, to maintain our economic
connectivity to the outside world. So there’s a myth that what our
forces do abroad is only combat, when the truth is if you look at the
operational experience, I mean decade after decade after decade, unless
you go back to the Second World War, it’s always been the case that
about 95% of our activity are operations other than war. So I posited
that we had established such an overmatch in our war fighting
capabilities between ourselves and the rest of the world, we’re the
last military superpower on the planet, and nobody’s really trying to
catch up with us, that we had to kind of make more explicit this divide
between a war fighting, or first half force, the force that can change
regimes, topple regimes, crush any traditional opponent in conventional
war using conventional firepower, and that second half force, the force
that does the everything else, the 95% of the workload, the day to day
stuff, the military to military cooperation, the presence, the power
projection to deter a Country A from attacking Country B, the crisis
response, the humanitarian assistance, a force that’s always out there
in a continuous interaction with the outside world, mostly engaging in
capacity building, and preventive application of U.S. military force.
And so I argue that that’s the everything else that we have to get
better at, because enemies won’t fight the leviathan anymore. HH: Because they’re not crazy. TB: Because if you do, you just get crushed. HH: Right. TB: Here’s a good example. I know the last Air Force pilot ever
involved in a dogfight. He’s a one-star general now. Ditto for the last
Naval aviator ever involved in a dogfight. And that just gives you a
sense of the disparity, and how distant we are, already more than a
decade, from that kind of force on force experience. So the average guy
we’re going to fight in the 21st Century is going to be an
insurgent. He’s not going to take on our leviathan, because you know,
go figure. He thinks it’s an unfair conflict, him versus a B-2. He’s
going to sit out that war, he’s going to wait until those crazy
Americans declare mission accomplished too early, and then when the B
team gets sent in, all the ground troops, which historically have been
kind of under-funded, under-equipped, and in this instance, they were
definitely undermanned, and then he goes after that force, and his goal
is to kill two or three Americans a day, and he’s going to throw
unlimited labor at that problem. And so unless we get better at the
second half, we’re going to be forced into it under the worst sorts of
conditions which is basically what Hamas and Hezbollah did to Israel in
August. They started a war they had no intention of winning, much less
waging, simply so they could get to the post-war, where they thought
they could get their just desserts. And they’ve done a pretty effective
job of it. HH: Two crucial insights from this, one that if you buy this
bifurcation of the American military, still under one command, one
chain of command, secretary of defense, et cetera, it will profoundly
impact what you buy to equip the Pentagon. TB: Absolutely. HH: Explain that for people. TB: Well, transformation has really been focused on the air quality
of our forces. And as Vernon Clark, the former CNO told me when I did a
story on Rumsfeld for Esquire, he said you know, in terms of the air
power, we’re basically there in terms of transformation. Eight out of
ten, maybe nine out of ten, but we’ve got to get the boots on the
ground that work the same way that the air platforms and the ships are
networked. And that’s really where we have to take things. So it has to
be less naval and less air force, and more bring that connectivity,
bring that firepower, make the strategic corporal on the ground the
most potent and efficient force that he could be, and the most
connected force, so he can do not just the shooting back, but he can do
the kind of peacekeeping and nation building effort that’s really far
more complex. I mean, you could train a 19 year old to do the leviathan
war fighting on instinct. We’ve been doing that for about 4,000 years.
But to train the sysadmin officer, the paradigm there is more like a 40
year old cop, serious wisdom. HH: That’s what…that’s my second insight. When you said that, I
nodded, but I’ve read a lot of military history for a lot of years, and
this goes back to Plutarch’s Lives, and Caesar’s Commentaries, right up
through VDH, Victor Davis Hanson on Sherman and others. And warriors
love glory, Thomas P.M. Barnett. What you’re describing about the
system administrator, will that attract anyone? TB: Well, what we find is that the Army, which is going to have this
experience more than any others, because for the Marines, it’s not much
of a trip back in history. They’re really only going back to about the
1930’s, because they’ve always been about small arms, small wars, the
three block war, and all that kind of concept. For the Army, you’re
really going back to almost the Cavalry frontier days. It’s a big
journey. They’ve become kind of the main frontier integrating, peace
building force, a kind of role we haven’t had since we conquered the
American West, and they get out of the business of the big war, because
basically, we can crush anybody in terms of the big war with air power.
So it is a shift, they do worry about losing their war fighting ethos,
and yet we know from reenlistment rates, kids love doing this. They
love feeling this kind of connectivity, they love this kind of
interaction with the population. It makes them feel like this is a real
difference maker, their efforts around the world. And when you look at
the echo boomers, who really are the generation that we’re bringing
online in terms of this sort of effort, this fits very nicely with
their view of the world. I mean, they are service oriented. They’re
horizontally networked. They’re less hierarchical. They’re more willing
to entertain notions of diversity and our interdependence with the
outside world. We’re raising a better generation for this. It’s not
going to be as hard as you think. HH: Has it made it into the procurement system yet? TB: No. And you know, this is the piece I wrote for Esquire last
year, the Monks of War. You know, the operational experience is
building up, because…and that’s going to start impacting the doctrine.
You saw that with the new counterinsurgency, okay? And the more we
build up the doctrine, and therefore the training, the harder it’s
going to be for people who are associated with these gigantic weapons
systems to point to doctrine, to point to training, to point to
realistic scenarios that they can say justifies the continued spending
on their magnificent beast, whatever it is. So we’re moving from, we
should be moving more and more, from the few and the absurdly expensive
to the many and the cheap, and the network, and the distributed, and
the reusable and the disposable, stuff that goes into the hands of
individual corporals and sergeants, that they can use on the ground to
make things happen. That shift will take time, there’ll be quite a lag,
it’s a lot of money attached to those programs, so it’s going to take a
build up of operations. - - - - HH: Dr. Barnett, I want to go back to my interview with New York
Timesman Burns from Friday, get your reaction to his assessment of the
American military in Iraq. Here it is: JB: There’s an old saying that countries get the kind of
governments they deserve. Well, I would say that may be true also of
their military. And the United States military that we encounter are
wonderful. They’re magnificent. They’re extremely brave, it goes
without saying, they make an enormous effort to perform a civic as well
as military duty in Iraq, they are people of honor, and they’re people
of whom America can be proud. And I say that without…in an
unhyphenated, unqualified way, and I hope that that finds its way into
the columns of the New York Times in the way that we report on this
war. America has a fine military, a fine Army, a fine Marine Corps and
Navy. HH: Now what I want to ask you, Dr. Barnett, is I know you know
that, and I know that, and obviously John Burns knows that. Most
Americans know that. Do the people around the world in the core and in
the gap know and believe that? TB: I think that the more distant societies are from warfare, and if
you haven’t lost a soldier in the last 45 years because you’ve been
that peaceful, that distant from the fight, you know, all you read are
the bad things our troops do, maybe, during peacetime. And you know,
I’m on the air with Chalmers Johnson last week, and he kind of reduced
our whole presence in Okinawa to a rape by a U.S. soldier against the
local population. And if you don’t understand the constant activity
that our troops are doing, and the enormous stress it places on them
individually and on their families, and instead just read the negative
headlines, and don’t look for the stories that never get told, then
yeah, you can blow this all off and say these guys are bad, and they do
bad things wherever they go, when the truth is, this is a military
that’s been struggling with tremendous effort to adjust itself to a new
reality. When you realize what Petraeus and Jim Mattis did, coming back
to their respective schoolhouses in Leavenworth and Quantico to revamp
the entire counterinsurgency doctrine, and come out with this new
reality that’s highly reflective of revolutionary war throughout
history, saying in effect successful counterinsurgency is 20% kinetic,
the shooting part, and 80% non-kinetic, the military recognizing they
have to get better at that 80%, but also making it incumbent on us, the
rest of U.S. society, the private sector, the rest of the U.S.
government, we all have to step up for that 80%. I mean, that
declaration of counterinsurgency, that division, 20-80, was a cry for
help. That was the Army and the Marines basically saying you know, we
can only do about 20% of this. We need help, which is why I argue that
sysadmin concept, which I think Petraeus and Mattis and others are
trying to build with great effort, and I think we’re seeing it in the
combined joint task force Horn of Africa, and I think we’re going to
see it if Africa command, which is going to be the future of the fight,
and the fight of the future. It’s got to be a more holistic effort on
our part. It’s got to be more civilian in uniform, and more private
sector than public sector, ultimately. HH: More next week. Dr. Thomas Barnett, thank you. Part number 7, same time next week on the Hugh Hewitt Show. End of interview.
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