The halls of Harvard are trod by those poor souls who couldn’t manage admission to Dartmouth.

Speaking personally, I’m not comfortable with that kind of girlish behaviour coming from an Admiral–especially one who is used to making as many policy decisions as he did.
It’s scary to think of how many more there are like him in similar positions of responsibility.

But I am not sure Fallon’s intuition, that we are being mislead into accepting the necessity of “the Long War”, is so wrong.

We are so sure that there are no easy answers, so habituated to: there is no free lunch, so intend on being “responsible” and convinced that Islamism, like Soviet Communism, requires a long haul effort, that we ignore the possibility that it might not. And in the meantime a huge industry is taking root, whose bread and butter depends on there being a “long haul.”

We refuse to consider that there might be a swift and even easy way to defeat today’s enemy.

My web site offers such a possible solution.

But the substance of the book itself is filled with Barnett Buzzwords describing Today’s Geopolitical Phenomena — Buzzwords that could easily do double duty for naming ultrahip apparel boutiques in Malibu: “the Core,” “the Gap,” “Lesser Includeds.” The interplay of economics, politics, and social trends is always downshifting or going into overdrive in this MTV-hip world, scenarios are horizontal except when they’re vertical, and with disconnectedness defining danger, we may be sure that there just aren’t enough rule sets being administered, and a System Perturbation is in the offing.

What it all boils down to is that the military must be TRANSFORMED. The flavor of this necessity can be best conveyed with a quotation from p. 298:

“America’s task is not perpetual war, nor the extension of empire. It is merely to serve as globalization’s bodyguard wherever and whenever needed through the Gap. This is a boundable problem with a foreseeable finish line. Moreover, if properly reconfigured, our military currently possesses all the skill sets needed to play both Leviathan across the Gap and ’system administrator’ to the Core’s ever-deepening security community. It is not a question of ‘paying any price’ but rather being far more explicit — both with ourselves and our allies — about what America seeks to achieve through the application of military force in this global war on terrorism. In short, we need to make clear to all — but especially to ourselves — that the American way of war serves a purpose far higher than merely assuring this country’s security or imposing its justice upon others. To achieve this lofty aim requires nothing less than recasting the structure of the U.S. military…”

This is a man who has talked himself into a slickly cast but basically foolish view of the world, through an extensive course of what in we uniform used to call PowerPoint Therapy. (An Air Force major friend and I used to refer to ourselves as being “in group” when we had to attend the endless policy meetings built around PowerPoint presentations.) It’s not so much that Barnett’s analytical framework of Core, Gap etc is all wet — although it is somewhat damp — as that his conclusions from it about “how we shall then live” are quite a walk across the water.

His book reminded me a lot, in its “self-licking ice cream cone” character, of Thomas Schelling’s Cold War classic, The Strategy of Conflict. Schelling famously used game theory to show that traditional uses of force were no longer viable in the nuclear age. And he made some interesting points, but you sure wouldn’t want to take his musings for action (one of our biggest Cold War problems was that we did).

In the course of setting up a theoretical discussion, Schelling posited the following: “The sophisticated negotiator may find it difficult to seem as obstinate as a truly obstinate man. If a man knocks at a door and says that he will stab himself on the porch unless given $10, he is more likely to get the $10 if his eyes are bloodshot.” To a sensible person, this beautifully exposes the shortcomings of the sophisticated negotiator. I don’t know what y’all do up at Harvard about things like this, but back in Oklahoma, we have all the requisite coping skills for such an eventuality. Our strategy is dominated by the words “twelve” and “gauge.”

It takes a heap of theorizing to get to where a Barnett or a Schelling ends up — and a heap of disconnectedness from reality. On the subject of Fallon himself, a tour at Pacific Command, where the 4-star has operated with surprising autonomy since the end of the Cold War (making as much of our Far East policy as executing the president’s), set him up poorly for the greater presidential supervision CENTCOM is currently under. Some flag officers could handle the transition, but Fallon wasn’t one of them.

It’s not a big, nefarious thing that policy in neglected theaters is made, de facto, by Naval officers; it has always been thus, because unlike the Army, the Navy is always in contact forward. But this would have been a tough transition for some senior officers, and clearly it was for Fallon.

That explains a lot. Thomas Barnett seems to be the typical pseudoeducated Harvard University graduate. The number one concern in their life is to be “hip and with it.” They place their wet finger into the air to see which way the leftist Zeitgeist is blowing. Barnett also reminds me of the arrogant David Halberstam who is responsible for the deaths of thousands in Vietnam. Harvard literally threatens the very survival of Western Civilization. This school has done so much damage.