Industrial World Warfare

Noah Shachtman picks up on the tendency of private contractors to feel they are the ones responsible for formulating and implementing national security policy.

Conflict of interest, or an interesting conflict?

...America's second largest ally in Iraq isn't the UK. Not even close. Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army. They are the battalions of foot soldiers in Thomas Barnett's sys-admin force -- connecting Iraq to the US and the world.

This role converts CEOs into generals/colonels in the US globalization machine... They are now legitimate and highly prized targets.

Halliburton, America's second-largest ally in Iraq. Now that's an interesting concept not highlighted by the mainstream media at all:

Corporations like Halliburton provide almost as many trigger pullers and engineers as the US Army.

It turns out that Thomas Barnett is a very big star in the intelligentsia of the Department of Defense. Harvard graduate. Professor at the War College. Author of a nice shiny new book where he promotes this bit of cleverness (warning: it's a "commercial" or .com site, but you get scanned by and cookies from knowledge.navsup.naval.mil when you visit it):

The UN rules, in retrospect, look odd. To pretend that a Sudan, for instance, which is doing what it's doing within its borders should have its sovereignty treated with the same respect as a France or Japan is ludicrous.

So while in the popular imagination, the UN is the forum for addressing international crises, the reality is that the UN is largely impotent, except for its internal technical rule-making, which functions quite nicely, frankly. The UN has become primarily a bitch-session, where the developing countries can complain about their lot and the direction of the advanced world. I think that's fine in many ways; it's good that the Gap has a venue and forum to complain in the direction of the Core. In fact, increasingly what you see is one position held by what I call the "old Core" -- the U.S., the E.U., Japan -- another position held by the Gap, and what I call the "new Core" -- the Brazil, India, China and South Africa -- acting as a sort of go-between. This is an arrangement which serves us well in terms of trade and economic and technical arguments.

But in terms of security, in the realm of violent situations, it's not realistic to pretend that 1) all countries are equal -- 'cause they're not: we have huge military capabilities and almost nobody else really does -- or 2) that every state has good intentions or treats its own people well. There are terrible things happening in certain parts of the world, and I think it's unrealistic to pretend that the U.N. is going to be able to stop these things.

So what I argue for in the book, and what I'm arguing for even more extensively in the next book, is that we need to come up with a transparent and fairly agreed-upon "A to Z" ruleset, as I call it, for dealing with politically bankrupt states. Again, as you said, we have a system for dealing with economically bankrupt states. Why? That's a fairly non-controversial subject compared to genocide or states trading in weapons of mass destruction. It's pretty basic to say, it would be nice if you paid back your creditors. But how do you deal with states that are either run by bad guys or in melt-down?

The traditional model has been imminent threat. You threaten me and I'll deal with you. But in a world of international norms and a stronger sense of community, haphazard responses just don't measure up.

Steffen: "He was reachin' for his gun" sounds pretty shabby in comparison to our economic and diplomatic decision-making processes?

Barnett: Well, what you want is not some sort of frontier justice, but a police force: something that represents the law, that points out when some guy transgresses the law, and takes him down when we catch him.

A more erudite John Bolton, indeed. He advocates policing the wogs to ensure they have the benefits of globalization. Not democracy, mind you.

And who should do this?

We need to rethink the connections between security and developmental economics. We need to stop having an antagonistic relationship between military people and the development community, because the fact is, we're not succeeding at all in these failed states. Insecure places are desperately poor places. Desperate poverty breeds insecurity. We need a new approach, a more comprehensive and integrated approach that sees these problems as two sides of the same coin and thinks differently about how to solve them.

Steffen: What would that approach look like on the ground, do you think, compared to what we're able to do now?

Barnett: Well, it would be what I call the System Administrator Force. It would be a people-intensive, UN-peacekeeping-plus approach that could defend itself -- could do counter-insurgency, could fight and not be some ineffective, pussy UN force where you shoot at them and half of them run away. It would be a tough force. You shoot at these guys, or start committing atrocities in their presence, and they would stop you, and if necessary, kill you. It could not only keep the peace, but enforce it.

It would also have a highly-trained civilian component. You'd have international, inter-agency teams. It'd look like the Casbah bar scene in Star Wars -- you'd want to see loads of uniforms from all sorts of countries, and you'd want to see civilians from all sorts of NGOs and aid agencies: you'd want the whole package, acting in a Great Depression, FDR sort of mode, where the first order of business (after enforcing the peace) would be to get everybody busy. The government that would be there would be some sort of transitional organization, an international reconstruction fund, with the goal of getting things stabilized, an economy working and laws written.

The United States military is going to continue to be critical to the whole process, though, for a long time, Other countries won't show up for peacekeeping unless the Americans will be there, and be there in numbers. And the NGO crowd can't really show up unless there's a stabilizing military presence there. So if you don't have the Americans, you don't have big enough coalitions to make it work, and if you don't have those coalitions, you don't have the NGOs who can turn things around, except for the bravest, most foolhardy ones who will go into the most dangerous situations, people like Doctors Without Borders.

But it's not going to be the United States alone, policing the whole world. It can't be. The only way that you can shrink the Gap and deal with these failed states and the humanitarian crises you're seeing is to bring together the assets and the energies and ideas from the Core as a whole: not just what the Americans can dream up, not even just what the Europeans can dream up, but the best innovations from an India, a China.

The military component would be predominant at first, then, over time, ramp down. These would be trained, experienced peacekeepers, and at first they would be everywhere, because our experience with peacekeeping is, the more peacekeepers you have, the fewer of them die.

We need to design an overwhelming presence, like that we've had on the warfighting side, for the peacekeeping side. Our warfighting force can actually be a small, elite, small footprint, highly maneuverable, lethal, mostly raining death-and-terror-from-the-skies crowd--

That's right, not a "pussy" U.N. force, but a highly trained professional civilian cadre. Peacekeepers. Like DynCorp. Or Blackwater. Or CACI. You know, private contractors.

Like Iraq. Halliburton's doing a great job of showing the benefits of globalization to the Iraqi people. Just ask Bu$hCo...