Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Little by little, we edge closer to understanding the role of the United States military today.

COL Foresman notes that presently (as was the case in the vast majority of our past) the role of the US military is to perform stability and support operations against forces resistant to our occupation(s).

The era of grand wars (against peer rivals with large armies) is presently curtailed. Now, as in much of our past, our wars will be fought against exceptionally weaker foes whose crime is to resist our efforts to modernize and connect them, and their resources, to our system.

Thus, our job today is to disrupt and destabilize areas of the world -- so as to reconform and restabilize them to our needs.

This, indeed, is a very different culture than what we have been used to recently -- and one that makes romanticizing the soldier (Tom's piece immediately above) a somewhat more difficult task.

The blackboard briefing mentality that too often runs top level service thinking is mirrored and connected with the same mentality in Congress and its related specialist staffs.

It is better most of the time to let field experienced people prudently deal with a problem or opportunity situation, and then adjust follow-up actions based on the results ... than to go through the endless blackboard dialogue process.

I'm more concerned about the personnel and promotion processes, and the nation's civil political equivalents, that put today's blackboard mafias in a central position to identify future leaders and the criteria by which they are selected.

Gen. Marshall and Rumsfeld both understood that aspect.

The flip side of this is to let politicians and military leaders get too preoccupied with success in dealing with near term problems and opportunities.

The globalized and flexible military and business institutions of late 19th century England was very effective in dealing with contemporary world brushfire situations.

Unfortunately, they paid insufficient attention to developing political and economic issues in Europe, and the technologies that would impact war. So they blundered into WW I, and started to fight it with Chinese Gorden type mindsets and methods that proved a disaster.