Military in the 21st Century

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The following is a transcript that I prepared from watching Thomas Barnett's presentation titled 'Military In The 21 Century' on C-Span.  The transcript is long - 10 web pages, but the content of his message was so important that I was compelled to transcribe it.  Barnett describes the silent war, the objectives, and the reasons.  He is military strategist in the Office of Force Transformation of the Department of Defense (DOD) lays out Wall Street's vision of the future.  Through subtleties that would make Josef Goebbels proud, Barnett presents the strategies for globalization and the destruction of the U.S. as a nation.  It is the plan to make it happen - to create history.  

[Note: Not all paragraphs denote a change in topic.  Since this was a verbal presentation, almost the entire thing is one long paragraph so I threw in some paragraph breaks so that your eyes don't get crossed reading it . Also, Barnett uses slides throughout the presentation that he refers to specifically at various points.  For most of those places, I didn’t bring forward the text on the slide.  In a few places, I did.]

 

Barnett Transcript - Military in the 21st Century

 

Introduction - Paul Davis, Executive Director, Center for Strategic Leadership Development

Thank you very much.  I'm Paul Davis, Professor in the War Studies Department and Executive Director, of the Center of Strategic Leadership Development.  Today it is my distinct pleasure to welcome you to the third event in the celebration of the 80th anniversary of the founding of the Industrial College of the Armed Forces. Last February the Commandant hosted 20 chief executive officers from corporations and associations instrumental to crafting the tools and capabilities the defense department relies on to maintain the nation’s security.  Deputy Secretary of Defense, the honorable Paul Wolfowitz and Air Force Chief of Staff, General John Jumper presented their strategic estimates of the national security situation.  These included their insights into not only the ongoing operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but also the longer range war on terrorism and the need for defense transformation. 

 

This event was followed immediately by an honoring of one of ICAF’s most famous alumni, General John Vesi, former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Of Staff.  We dedicated the other auditorium in this college to General Vesi and recognize his many accomplishments with an honorary doctorate.  General Vesi in turn, honored us with an insightful and inspiring lecture from this very stage.  Today’s symposium is our opportunity to focus on the present and contemplate what it will mean to lead in the emerging environments.  We have titled this symposium,  “Strategic Thinking In Complex Environments”.  One thing we have emphasized this entire academic year is how thinking strategically differs from the focus of our daily operational lives.  Let me suggest, for this symposium that thinking strategically means to think about how we think and what we think about.  To consider our basic values and beliefs of how and why things occur as they do.  We don’t have time to do this as a matter of routine in our operationally demanding lives but such strategic thinking is critically important in these complex and turbulent times. 

 

We will spend this morning with Dr. Thomas Barnett, a strategic researcher and professor at the Naval War College in Newport RI.  He will focus our attention on critical national security issues and propose transformational solutions [1] as he develops it’s strategies for combating global uncertainties and their associated risks.  After lunch, we will be joined by Ms. Laura Anderson, a national partner for strategy and development of KPMG in Melbourne Australia, an expert in strategic planning, risk management and capability planning.  Ms. Anderson has an international reputation for innovation.  Following Laura, we will hear from Mr. Greg Cudahey, the global director of B2B, Business-2-Business and supply chain optimization [2] for the international consultant Cap Gemini, one of the leading global management, information technology consulting firms in the world. Mr. Cudahey manages the largest supply chain consultancy in the world.   Immediately following his lecture, Mr. Cudahey will be rejoined by Dr. Barnett and Ms. Anderson for a short panel discussion in which the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions to which the three will be able to respond. We conclude the symposium tomorrow morning with a lecture by Mr. Chris Myer, CEO of Monitor Networks, a new part of the Michael Porter’s Monitor Group.  Mr. Myer’s entire career has been at the cutting edge of knowledge management and information technology applications for adaptive enterprises.  You may be familiar with three books he has co-authored with Stan Davis: Blur, Future Wealth and It’s Alive. Our hope is that this symposium will heighten your awareness of the strategic considerations [3] that must be dealt with by leaders of business, the military and governments. As you manage through the uncertainties and risks of the complex environments that are co-evolving at unprecedented rate.  So let us begin.

 

Dr. Tom Barnett earned his PhD in political science from Harvard.  He received his on-the-job training if you will, as a project director at the Center for Naval Analysis. He has been a research project director at the Naval War College for over a decade and directed the New Rules Sets Project in partnership with Cantor-Fitzgerald [4]. Dr Barnett is the author of the new book that is causing quite a stir around Washington, “The Pentagon’s New Map, War and Peace in the 21st Century”.  Without further adieu, let me introduce the person that Vice Admiral Art Cebrowski, the Director of the Office of Transformation for Secretary Rumsfeld, refers to as “My Strategy Guy”, Tom (Barnett).    

 

Applause

 

Dr. Thomas Barnett

I like to describe the brief in this presentation as the product of about a six-year conversation with Art Cebrowski in addition to a long mentoring relationship I’ve had or enjoyed with Hank Gaffney at the Center for Naval Analyses and a similar relationship with retired four-star admiral Bud Flanagan recently of Cantor Fitzgerald.    The way I like to describe the conversation with Art is to note that we came to the war college at roughly the same time - summer 1998.  He had a list of things he wanted us to study.  At the top of that list obviously: net-centric warfare.  At that point more glimmer in his eye than the dogma it has become at the Pentagon.  At the bottom of that list was a very odd subject - the potential for the year 2000 problem to serve as a security situation around the planet.   As the most recent hire and the professor with the least standing, I was given that project.  It turned out to be the most fascinating project I’d ever done. It was a grand exploration of how we think about instability and crisis in this interconnected world. And that is really how Art Cebrowski really 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.  It got us a lot of interesting press.  I was dubbed the Nostradamus of the Navy.  Jack Andersen, the muckraking journalist wrote an expose on my secretly training the U.S. government and the Marine Corp to take over society in the event of chaos on January 1st - and he had pictures.  My wife said, “If you can do all that from your desk at Newport, why can’t you take out the garbage on Tuesdays like I ask?”

 

Our worst-case scenario - pretty fantastic.  Wall Street shut down for a week; air travel in the United States shut down for about 10 days; a surge in hate crimes against ethnic groups identified as part of the problem, a surge in gun buying; islanding of certain services - especially insurance; breakdowns of just-in-time supply chains - a terrible description of January 1, 2000; a very prescient description of September 12th 2001[5].  It wasn’t because we were predicting anything.  I was scheduled to be on 105th floor of the World Trade Center two weeks to the day after 9-11 so obviously we weren’t predicting the trigger.  But we had thought long and hard about the horizontal scenarios that would emerge from that vertical shock. 

 

We were approached by Cantor-Fitzgerald in the midst of this workshop series.  They had done a series of workshops with the war college in the early 1990s - looked at a war in the Persian Gulf; looked at a financial crisis beginning in SE Asia; looked at a terrorist strike in downtown Manhattan.  So we were pretty impressed with their thinking ahead capabilities.  They said we think we’ve seen this Y2k beast before.  We said really? What did it look like?  They said we think we saw it in the Asian flu [A] [B]  We said, "boy, that does not compute".  We’re talking about software failure and you are talking a financial panic.  The way I translated what they said to me next was essentially, “we like to look at the world in terms of Rule Sets”.  What’s a Rule Set? [6]  Hockey has a Rule Set; American football has a Rule Set; the U.S. legal system has a Rule Set; the U.S. military has a Rule Set.  You walk into these venues; you know what the rules are basically.  And their argument for the 1990’s, which they said was similar to the 1920’s, was that rule sets were out of whack.  That in the process of expanding the global economy so dramatically across the 80’s and 90’s, economic rules sets raced ahead of political rule sets.  Technological rule sets and connectivity in general raced ahead of security rule sets. [7] In effect, we wired up much faster than we had the ability to keep pace with in terms of the political and security rule sets.  Their fear with Y2k was that it would be something cataclysmic and that it would crystallize our understanding of those rules sets out of whack and that there would be a period of tremendous rule set catch-up at that point. 

 

We do a workshop with Cantor-Fitzgerald, Windows on the World, 107th floor, WTC 1, 1999.  They like it so much; they say lets do a series on globalization itself.  We’ll call it the New Rules Sets Project.  We’re going to focus on developing Asia.  Because in their mind, the integration of roughly half the world’s population since 1980 is changing rule sets all over the planet. 

 

Best place to catch it frankly, is the Wall Street Journal.  And you have to extrapolate back in the direction of New York Times and security, and back in the direction of the Washington Post and politics, which frankly is the slowest of the three in terms of dealing with change [8].  So we did a series of workshops on developing Asia.  One was on energy. One was on foreign direct investment.  One was on environmental damage. [9]

 

Everything I read in the Wall Street Journal today, I heard about from Wall Street about 5 or 6 years ago. So again, I find their intelligence networks VERY impressive.

 

This project gets shot out from under us somewhat literally on 9-11.  Cantor loses between 650-700 people.  At that point I’m footloose and fancy-free.  Art Cebrowski has just retired as a 3-star, goes to work for Secretary Rumsfeld as his transformation guru.  He asks me to come work for him.  I said, my wife told me I could marry my divorce attorney and move back to Washington anytime I damn well pleased.  He said, don’t worry, I’m the father of net-centric warfare, here is a cell phone - it’s called southwest to BWI and about 200 flight credits later, this briefing exists.  What Art asked me to do in this briefing was to give him a larger context; to elevate the discussion of transformation beyond the whack list - as in what gets cut.    As he likes to tell people, America doesn’t have a grand strategy. I needed one for my job so I outsourced the function to Barnett. [10].  And that is what this brief became - audacious beyond belief - purposefully so though. 

 
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[1] Transformation' is a key word to describe the transition from the 'old America' to the 'new America'.  In the military, 'transformation' is the transition to consolidated (joint) leadership and new concepts in military organization and operation.  It began under George H.W. Bush's administration but the policy has continued across administrations.

Biography - Donald H. Rumsfeld

"Secretary Rumsfeld proposed and the President approved a significant reorganization of the worldwide command structure, known as the Unified Command Plan, that resulted in the establishment of the U.S. Northern Command and the U.S. Strategic Command, the latter charged with the responsibilities formerly held by the Strategic and Space Commands which were disestablished."

 

Rumsfeld: Defense Strategy Outdated

http://www.nci.org/01/06/22-ap-defense_outdated.htm

By Robert Burns, AP Military Writer, June 22, 2001

WASHINGTON (AP) - The "two war" strategy that has underpinned U.S. military planning for the past decade has outlived its usefulness, leaving the United States increasingly vulnerable to emerging threats like ballistic missiles and cyberattack, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress...

He described the emerging new defense strategy in broad terms, with the barest of detail.  He said it would emphasize being prepared for future threats while defending the United States against current threats like terrorism and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons."  

[2]  Corporate Culture infecting the military

Its apparent that one of the consequences of the redefinition of economic policy to be foreign policy that occurred beginning in the GHW Bush Administration was to empower business executives to bring their expertise to the table in matters where their expertise is dangerous.  A major line has been crossed and our soldiers are paying for it with their lives and our country's reputation and good name are suffering for it. Corporations run on fundamentally different principles than a government and a military should run.  Corporations are interested in profits - period.  They will do anything - say anything - buy anybody - to increase the bottom line. 

Risk management for a corporation is entirely different than risk management for the defense of a nation.  Risk to a corporation means money and market share.  Risk to the military means lives.  To a corporation - lives are not important.  People are simply factors of production - expendable commodities.  It should go without saying that the introduction of corporate culture in the military is not desirable (how's that for an understatement?) 

Remember during the first part of the Iraq war when our soldiers didn't have supplies - not enough water, not enough food, not enough bullets?  They didn't have body armor.  They had open air HumVees without armor.  The reason is because of the corporate efficiency of supply chain management.  Supply chain management means not purchasing equipment and supplies until you need them.  Obviously, you can't have a prepared military - ready to go on a moments notice if you are using a supply chain management system.  What works for corporations in terms of ordering cartons of paper... does not work for a soldier who needs body armor because he's been called into a conflict. Nobody dies if the cartons of paper take a little longer to arrive than expected.  There are also about a 100,000 paper dealers in the country - if one can't provide the supplies - another one will.   How many suppliers of body armor are there? 

And open air HumVees without armor?   They are very rugged and very expensive.  But are they appropriate for a war zone?  It would seem not.  My guess would be that the purchase of these HumVees was a sweetheart deal for the corporation and the procurement officers.  It's rather obvious that the thinking was not on the lives of the soldiers and conflict conditions when the purchase was made - and that is the problem with the corruption of corporate influence in the military.  The focus is on the corporations profit margins - not on the lives of soldiers.

[3]  This comment is to 'heighten your awareness'

Look at Paul Davis' statement again: "Our hope is that this symposium will heighten your awareness of the strategic considerations that must be dealt with by leaders of business, the military and governments".  When presentations and speeches are prepared, the order of lists is important.  The most important item is listed first and down the line to the least important.  Paul Davis was giving first priority to the strategic considerations of business - over those of the military and the government.  With this statement he reveals that business considerations are their highest priority.

[4]  Cantor-Fitzgerald

Cantor-Fitzgerald was located in the World Trade Center and they were the largest dealer in government securities prior to September 11, 2001.  The 'partnership' that Davis is referring to is that from 1998 through 1999 Barnett did a series of workshops for a project named "Year 2000 National Security Dimensions" that looked at the national security implications of the Y2k date problem. The 1998-1999 timeframe was too late for this project to have been for the purpose of analyzing national security implications.  It is my opinion (based on 20 years as a systems analyst) that there was another - unstated purpose behind these workshops.  Since they were looking at best and worst case scenarios - worst case being coup d'etat, my thinking is that they were conveying the message through the subtext that a coup d'etat would take place.  Depending upon the delivery of the messages, the business executives may or may not have been aware of the subtext at the time - but certainly following Sept. 11 and the obvious cover-up, sooner or later it would occur to them.

Following the Year 2000 project, Barnett and Cantor-Fitzgerald did another series of workshops titled "The Pentagon's New Map".  This is so obvious. These were the strategic planning sessions for what would occur after Y2k - after the silent coup d'etat on January 1, 2000.  Since Cantor was the largest dealer in federal government securities, they were in position to be able to use the dufus defense... lost the paperwork, etc. on the records of the securities.  The title, "Pentagon's New Map" is a gigantic clue that the Pentagon was breaking free of management by the U.S. Congress.  They - in 'partnership' with the corporate defense contractors and Wall Street insiders were going to determine foreign policy, military plans for the future and military strategies for accomplishing the goals of the policy (which at this point were corporate economic policies - not foreign policies).     

[5]  a prescient description of September 12th 2001

This is Barnett From Page 2, paragraph 6:

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.... [at the time they were having these sessions, the market was booming which means that Cantor and the people at the War College knew that the tech boom was a fraud and that there would be changes in law in the way the securities industry does business] if you get far enough away from the last crash, pretty soon you only have stock brokers - which is a young person’s game, who can’t remember what that last crash looked like and the further they get from that last crash, they start talking about new rules, new ways of doing things, new realities, which we typically discover after the crash involve lying, cheating, stealing and you get a rule set reset.  So we could see that with the tech crash but that was only going to impact the financial sector and again it was ripe for it.  We were looking for something really unprecedented that would impact the political and security fields.  I think we get it with 9-11. [Ask yourself - why would they be looking for something really unprecedented that would impact the political and security fields when they weren't that concerned about Y2k?  Was it because they needed something to stop the investigations into Wall Street securities investigations that were underway?  The SEC was located in the WTC.  On September 11, 2001 the records of those investigations were lost.  Wasn't that convenient?  And I can draw a line, I’ve been thinking about it for 5 years - lots of new rule sets since 9-11.  I can still pick up a New York Times, a Wall Street Journal, a Washington Post and in every single day, find you a story about an some amazing new rule set that redefines the nature of privacy, how we handle information, definitions of criminal behavior, definitions of un-American behavior, new definitions of war.

[6] What’s a Rule Set?

The concept of a 'Rule Set" is very important to understanding much of what Barnett talks about.  The use of this term as a conceptual framework for looking at the world - tells me that computer systems people are mired in the middle of this conspiracy.  It's a logical way of looking at the world so that you can design computer systems for it.  Systems people look at the world as a system - everything is a system.  Systems breakdown into subsystems which breakdown into functions which breakdown into entities.  An entity is any unique, identifiable component within a system.  It can be a person, place or thing - logical or physical.  The 'rule set' is how the entities are handled within the system.

A 'Rule Set' as Barnett is using the term can be formal - as in the case of laws or it can be informal as in the case of norms of behavior.  The Rule Set defines the expected reaction for an action.  So when Barnett and Cantor named the project, "The New Rule Sets Project, that was significant and it is a major clue that what they were doing was analysis and strategic planning for a new system.

The ethical use of the skills of a systems analyst is that they analyze systems and processes to help make existing processes more efficient.  If an unethical or corrupt systems analyst is given systems authority to redesign entire systems - you end up with systems like the 'Total Information Awareness' system that records every conceivable bit of information about a person.  You end up with things like the Veri-Chip that will be used to 'mark' (666) people with a unique ID.  You then design GPS tracking systems so that you can know and monitor the locations of those people at all times.   You design systems to enslave people... not to liberate them from drudgery.  Redesigning systems to enslave people is to define 'new Rule Sets' for how the entities (people) are handled within the system.

At the heart of what Barnett talks about in this presentation is that Wall Street wants to invest in China and India because they have billion and a half people and a billion people respectively.  Their visions are for a middle class in China and India that is double or triple our entire population.  The fact that China is a Communist country and India is a Socialist country is irrelevant to them - because they live here - they are just doing business there where they can get the cheapest labor in the world - to generate the highest profits - even though it means destroying our country to do it.  The destruction of the World Trade Center was symbolic that they consider the United States as the proverbial buggy whip as Larry "the Liquidator" said in the Movie: "Other People's Money".  To the Wall Street traitors, the United States IS the New England Wire & Cable Co. and they are liquidating us.  The 'New Rules' being defined are to control and enslave us because they expect a backlash at the conversion of our system to communist control under the UN system of communist social engineering. 

[7] Technological rule sets and connectivity in general raced ahead of security rule sets.  

What he is talking about is that networked computer systems were developed before there the security implications were analyzed and solved.  This left computer systems of the large corporations vulnerable, it left systems like the NYSE trading system vulnerable, and it left our government vulnerable.  The tech boom of the 1990's was totally engineered.  It was market manipulation.  It's not known if weaknesses in the NYSE trading system were exploited as in the case of Enron and the California energy trading system or whether the NYSE trading system itself was designed with security flaws for insiders to exploit, but since it is well known that all previous investment norms were broken during the period, and some people made mind boggling amounts of money (including members of congress) on corporations that for the most part went bankrupt after the boom was over, it seems fairly clear that something was amiss in the trading system - which is precisely what Barnett is saying.  Also, it should be noted that the tech boom provided the liquidity to build the global network connecting India and China.  This project would not have been economically viable on it's own nor would it have been advisable considering what it has done to our economy.  It made possible the export of our knowledge economy to India and it made it cheaper for supply chain management systems to purchase from China.  Both of these things have had a devastating effect on the U.S. economy despite what the lying whores of the media, universities, corporations and government officials say.  When a country loses millions of high paying jobs.... they take the tax base with them and the replacement Walmart and Home Depot jobs don't make up the difference.  

[8] politics, which frankly is the slowest

The political process is too slow to keep up with traitors in the technology industries.  Even if they moved faster, the Congress is comprised of a bunch of old men (primarily) who are technological illiterate (and corrupt), morons who are barely functionally literate, a few - damn few honest brokers who are marginalized so that they can't interrupt the money flow, and a few really smart crooks.  They are institutionally incapable of protecting our country from the traitors in the technology industries.

[9] series of workshops on developing Asia

The three areas of focus that Barnett is talking about are related to the Iraq war, the draining of our economy as Wall Street investment moves to COMMUNIST China, and the UN Agenda 21 which is really nothing more than a corporate agenda to control resources behind the cloak of environmentalism, humanitarianism and egalitarianism.  It is a means to steal the wealth of our nation right out from under us.

[10] America doesn't have a grand strategy

This is one of Barnett's insider jokes on us.  The reference to outsourcing is a refer back to the global network and the export of our technology sector to India.  Barnett's assignment was to prepare a presentation defining 'the new rules' for everyone.  The presentation defines who is running the show and what the 'grand strategy'.  It is the Wall Street agenda of developing Asia and destroying the United States.  Our economy has been severely weakened by outsourcing, 9-11 was the excuse to make war on Iraq to get their oil to sell to China to feed the industries that are growing because of the foreign direct investment, and the implementation of the UN Agenda in the U.S. to steal the rest of U.S. assets that they didn't get with the stock market manipulation.