Thomas Barnett writes of the competing pressures in the United States

“You’d think the great search for the replacement for the Soviet threat would have finally ended after 9/11, but sadly that’s not the case. Too many profits on the line. Army generals are fed up with being told that the global war on terrorism is the Pentagon’s number-one priority, because if it were, they and their Marine Corps brethren would be getting a bigger slice of the pie instead of so much being set aside for some distant, abstract threat. It’s bodies versus bucks, folks. . .”

The perception in the US also determines the defence budgets of its sometimes allies, including the UK and Canada.

It’s not about trust, it’s about his protecting his PNM worldview from other competitive memes and making his ideas more marketable by downgrading other IR memes. We’ll see in fifty to hundred years who was right I guess. Barnett, Kaplan, or both may end up just being footnotes in an archaic book on IR theory.

You have to wonder about Barnett though. A guy who doesn’t “trust” a blog because it “revels” too much in a competitive theory yet goes on to say that this blog “does get around and you have to respect that.” Blog politics at its finest. Someone should set Kaplan and him up for a death by powerpoint no-holds-barred match.

I don’t trust the Coming Anarchy for the most part because they revel a bit too much in that Fourth Generation Warfare-way, and because they seem too accepting of Robert Kaplan’s view of things (hence the name, one imagines).

What’s not to trust?

Dan, scan ““ focus ““ act is like the OODA loop for the individual troop. It is Metz’s ideal qualities for the “Strategic Corporal.” Once I get the conference proceedings, with the full notes, I can post more detail.

Here you go:

http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002832.html

Scan-Focus-Act sounds like Boyd’s Observe-Orient-[Decide]-Act

Self-promotion: the civilian expert, systematic, approach should be found in a Military-Industrial-SysAdmin-Complex

Germany spends only 1.4%, and today we read that a leading politician there is calling for further cuts – by reducing the order for Eurofighter jets by a third, saving $1.5 billion. Moreover, “He also called for a scaling down of orders from the British, Spanish and Italian governments, which are involved in the project.”