TED: Thomas Barnett - The Pentagon's New Map for War and Peace

Lately I've been watching a lot of the talks given at the TED conference. TED takes place each year in Monterrey, CA and shows off the ideas of some of the world's most inspired thinkers. Most of the talks and performances are now posted on YouTube, so it is a great way to spend the occasional 20 minutes or so of down time. They are all pretty thought provoking, and I'll probably be posting many of them here.

Here's one to get you started:

Thomas Barnett is a strategic planner who has been working for the Pentagon since the cold war ended. He gave an entertaining briefing at TED about how the Pentagon needs to adapt for post cold war conflicts like Iraq and Afghanistan. Specifically, he outlines a procedure for processing politically bankrupt states and proposes a dedicated force of people to manage the peace before and after conflicts. He argues that we have a brilliant Secretary of War, but we also need a Secretary of Everything else.

Here's a few choice quotes. The link is embedded below.

We field a first half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. That’s the problem. We can run the score up against anybody and then get our asses kicked in the second half.
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What are we missing? A functioning executive to translate will into action. Because we don’t have it every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this immanent threat thing. We haven’t faced an immanent threat since the Cuban missile crisis – 1962. But we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we’re a democracy and that’s what it takes. If that doesn’t work, we scream “He’s got a gun!” just as we rush in. Then we look over the body, and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say “Jesus it was dark.”
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What we need downstream is a great power enabled Systems Administration force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the heels of that Leviathan force sweeping towards Baghdad. What you get then is no looting, no military disappearing, no ammo disappearing, no Muqtadah Al-Sadr. No insurgency. Talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months: We had six months to feel the love, get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. Then they turned on us.
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The question is, how do we reconnect American national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet?... Let's have a Department of War and a Department of Something else. Some people say, "Hell, 9/11 did it for you. Now we got a home game: an away game." Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel-good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA: Thousands Standing Around. Just be grateful Robert Reed didn't shove that bomb up his ass.