Building the Military-Industrial-Syadmin-Complex
The United States already has seven uniformed services
- Air Force
- Army
- Coast Guard
- Marine Corps
- Navy
- NOAA Corps
- Public Health Service
While the latter two are relatively toothless, the first five on the list do show that uniform services can become critical.
Give Them GunsWhile at the Boyd Conference, one questioner asked a panel composed of William Lind, Frank Hoffman, and Bruce Goodmanson if they could help with a new legislative initiative to be proposed shortly: create a Uniformed Service under the Department of Homeland Security. I regret not writing down the questioner’s name. This is an amazingly exciting proposal, for one reason: capabilities create intentions.
In the panel proper, Bruce explained how the trench warfare of World War I was enabled by the large gun factories created by the British and French for a naval war against each other that never happened. Nonetheless, the ability to mass produce lots of very large guns remained after the English Channel Threat had passed. So when a new problem (German aggressiveness) came up, warfighters reached for the tools they already had: in that case, including large artillery pieces.
If this sounds familiar, it should. While pre-Great-War Britain and France featured miniature Military-Industrial-Artillery complexes, the United States currently possesses an enormous Military-Industrial-Leviathan-Complex (MILC). While the MILC has largely outlived its usefulness — what was once our front-line defense against a Soviet takeover of the world is now relegated to topping the odd tyrant and defending Taiwan — the way it enabled our 5GW against Soviet Communism is something we must always be greatful for.
Now it is time to build a Military-Industrial-Sysadmin-Complex (MISC) to win our 5GW to shrink the gap. Because 5GW relies on observation and not orientation, it does not matter if policy makers intend to fight the 5GW at the outset, so long as what they observe leads them to do so anyway. You know the old expression, “when you have a hammer, every problem looks like a nail?” The 5GWarrior who wishes to shrink the gap must think the same way. We need to give our policy makers a Military-Industrial-Sysadmin-Complex so that more problems in the Gap looks like jobs for the Sysadmin.
Creating a uniformed service under Homeland Security is a way to do this. It does not matter if policy makers originally see the Homeland Security Corps as a tool for rescuing people from hurricanes, fighting forest fighters, or state-building in Arab Africa. All that matters is that it has the capability to do system administration, in the same way that those old naval guns had the capability to do trench warfare.
Capabilities create intentions. Shrink the Gap. Build a Gap-Shrinking-Platform.
Create the Homeland Security Corps.
Filed in The Vault and tagged MISC
With this post I'm getting more behind the spirit of this idea. Creating a tool that decision makers can use to work in areas of the world that we need to relate to, where current approaches fail. The available tools that immediately come to mind are destruction (Iraq model), aid (Africa model), social engineering of elections (colour coded revolution model). None of these have seemed to particularly work either to advance long term American interests or the wellbeing of those in the area.
I completely disagree that arming the Homeland Security Department would build the right tool, but I agree with the spirit of the idea.
Personally, I dislike the meme "shrinking the gap" because it seems to indicate that the American and Western (I'm Canadian btw) culture, economy and way of life are better and we need to bring others up to our level. While there are certainly many positive offerings of western culture, it is not any kind of universal solution.
Shrinking the gap really means empowering people, even if they don't want to emulate the western model. An enforced homogenous model can't work. Work would need to be done so that Sysadmin was not empowering people and groups who would then turn around and attack us, but empowerment will necessarily create competing power structures. That's OK.
If the Sysadmin force operates out of the short-sighted policy goals of one country, it will fail. There has to be a real sense that it is working for everyone (always some exceptions), or resistance will be continuous.
Ryan,
The tools we want to have are economic integration and a military-enforced 'bankruptcy'. The tools we actually have are economic integration and rogue-state-takedown. So we need a military force that can actually process a state that we've occupied, instead of just being happy that we spoiled the chances of this-or-that regime of returning.
This is an incorrect summary of the current wave of globalization, unless you describe "American and Western" as relatively open markets, a gdp above $4000 per capita, etc. Korea and Japan, as non-western non-american states, display substantial cultural variance from Europe and North America, while maintaining their status as globalized economies. (In the same way, America is significantly different from much of European culture.)
PS: In what way does the term "shrinking the gap" describe something different?
Indeed, which is my the Sysadmin has to be structural -- not just an operation of the military, but a full Military-Industrial-Sysadmin-Complex.