Kaplan's strategic lap dance for the U.S. Navy and Pacific Command

The piece in question is Robert Kaplan's "How We Would Fight China" in the June issue of The Atlantic Monthly. "Sell out" isn't too strong a term for what Kaplan does in this piece. As someone who's worked for the Navy for a decade and a half, I don't think I've ever seen analysis that whores itself more for the most over-the-top strategic fantasies of naval leaders who feel embittered and betrayed by the end of the Cold War. This is U.S. Navy and Pacific Command propaganda at its best.

Kaplan buys into everything he's told by PACOM and especially the chest-thumping submarine crowd of the U.S. Navy about the inevitability of war with China, and he doesn't seek to balance their amazingly narrow view of the world whatsoever. It is a stunningly unbalanced piece of work, something I recognize from years of reading Soviet newspapers and wondering exactly who could be so stupid to swallow this sort of stuff unthinkingly. Frankly, I'm amazed the magazine printed it, it's that bad.

I guess I realize why Kaplan writes stuff like this. I mean, if you want continued access to the U.S. military, peddle their stuff so they love you. But really, the analysis in this piece is cartoonishly bad. I mean, so bad that the vast majority of the U.S. military outside of PACOM would find it hyperbolic.

His first paragraph has the Chinese navy lobbing missiles from Central Asia at our ships in the Pacific. Why? Under what conditions? Who the hell cares? Let's just get this party started.

Second paragraph notes that China will have "distinct advantages over the United States," as in "sheer proximity."

Think about how goofy that sounds. China will be advantaged-somehow-by the fact that the envisioned battlefields (or waters) are really, really close to their shores and really, really distant from ours. This is the opening logic on display in this piece. What an advantage to have war in your front yard as opposed to your alleged enemy's front yard! This is why living in the ghetto is so much better than the suburbs.

Does anybody see that as slightly backward? I mean, should America seek to entice the Chinese navy to the shores of California so as to improve our "sheer proximity" advantage?

Next we're told that "while stateless terrorists fill security vacuums, the Chinese fill economic ones."

Yes, the two are basically one in the same, threat-wise. I can't believe I've been so naïve to miss this all these years. Two sides of the same coin, China and Al Qaeda, both desiring the same ends.

China's experiencing rapid growth and-can you believe it!-it's "establishing business communities and diplomatic outposts," and it's "negotiating construction and trade agreements" the world over. All of this is described by Kaplan as demonstrating China's genius at "indirect influence" that-of course-puts the U.S. at great strategic risk over time. I mean, really! "Construction and trade agreements"! Who do those Chinese think they are? Genghis Frickin' Trump?

Ah, but China's rise is fueled by a "martial energy," we are told by Kaplan. What that means, I have no idea, but screw it, the man's on a roll.

China's peasantry is "overwhelmingly literate," boasts Kaplan, and thus "China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium."

Let me give you that sentence in full so it doesn't sound like I'm making this up: "Pulsing with consumer and martial energy, and boasting a peasantry that, unlike others in history, is overwhelmingly literate, China constitutes the principal conventional threat to America's liberal imperium."

China's peasants can read and write, so naturally they're a huge component of China's threat, because-as history so often shows-rural folk who can read and write tend to reject liberty and demand aggressive expansionistic wars at all cost. Crazy, but there you have it.

That covers the first two paragraphs of the piece, and all I can say is that America needs a better reason to go to war with China than Robert Kaplan's obvious desire to cover that conflict from the trenches.

But this is what America-and the U.S. military-gets when we pretend that journalists are our best sources for grand strategy and national security thinking. Me, I see garbage in, garbage out.

Clever as he is, Kaplan switches subjects before you think too long about all the asinine assertions he's just made. So we're told this vision of future war must all be true because of some elemental truths he's discovered about alliance systems in general and NATO in particular.

"The first thing to understand is that the alliance system of the latter half of the twentieth century is dead. Warfare by committee, as practiced by NATO, has simply become too cumbersome in an age that requires light and lethal strikes." Yes, NATO was never a pawn of the U.S. during the Cold War, it was "warfare by committee." And now that beautiful dream has been crushed by the post-Cold War challenges we face today.

Then Kaplan goes on to cite Kosovo, which-as we know-proves this point in spades. I mean, NATO dithered on the Balkans for years and . . . what exactly happened to the strategic environment? Oh, nothing. So I guess that proves that alliance politics are dead. Hell, if NATO can't get its act together quickly on something as world history-changing as the Serbs and the Croats and the Bosnians going at it, then clearly we're living in a new age.

Of course, NATO might have dithered because they saw the Balkans as meaningless strategically, but that's beside the point. Bob wrote a book on this subject, and as we know from his many travels, he had found the end of the world at the ends of the world.

You know, Kaplan and Tom Friedman should get together and write about the world not only being flat, but make the case that "beyond here be dragons!" Now that would be a cool map I'd buy!

The real point here is that when-as Kaplan argues-the U.S. waltzed into Afghanistan on its own, NATO did nothing more than offer peacekeeping in those areas already pacified by the U.S. military. I guess you might argue that expecting anything else after the U.S. was attacked directly by terrorists led by an organization based in Afghanistan and then Washington decided unilaterally-but with the clear blessing of a shocked world-to subsequently invade the country and topple the regime might be a little much (Remember how Americans helped pacify the Falklands in the early 1980s along with our British allies? Oh well, bad example.), but let's not quibble here. Clearly, this proves that NATO is dead.

Now, Kaplan tells us, "Much of NATO has become a farm system for the major-league U.S. military."

Wow Bob! You've finally figured that out about 40 years after it happened. As Rip Van Winkles go, you kick Friedman's napping ass.

Then we get to the real advertisement, and here's where the lap dance gets hot and heavy. We're told we already have a NATO in the Pacific, and it's called Pacific Command. That's right. All by itself PACOM is a NATO equivalent because it's the imperial garrison that operates virtually on its own, without political oversight. You think the important meetings on global power occur in Davos? Asks Kaplan. Well, you're wrong. Honolulu's the place, and the commander of PACOM is really the man who comes closest to running the world. Five time zones from meddling Washington, this is where the real Bismarcks of the U.S. military thrive!

This is complete nonsense, but no matter. Kaplan believes the world is run by military power and he's located the biggest single concentration of standing U.S. forces in the world, so-by logical extension-Honolulu is the capital of global power. Does it matter that the $50 billion of foreign direct investment that flows into China every year, effectively fueling its rise (along with that martial energy, mind you), passes into the Middle Kingdom without so much as a word from Honolulu? Hah! Only a neo-Wilsonian Marxist fool would see any importance in that!

Kaplan sounds quite rational when he notes that China might actually have a reason to safe-guard its sea-lanes of transport for energy flowing from the Middle East. I mean, the U.S. has lots of economic connectivity with the outside world and we have a big navy to protect it, and that big navy doesn’t threaten anyone except terrorists and rogues, but certainly the Chinese cannot be expected to think along these lines. Clearly, this has nothing to do with protecting themselves but only with threatening us!

This darker view, we are told by Kaplan, is the sort of clear-headed logic by which we need to guide our strategic decision-making. We can't expect that from the "raptures of liberal internationalism and neo-conservative interventionism" to be found in DC. No, we need the "cautious, mechanical, and utilitarian" approaches to power as exercised by military officers.

Ah yes, the pagan warrior ethos of Kaplan in full bloom. We can't trust the wooly-headed politicians who are duly elected in our republic, so our only hope for strategic survival is to turn over our foreign policy to the military officers of Pacific Command.

Bud Flanagan, a former four-star admiral and good friend of mine who later went to work on Wall Street, several years ago expressed to me his amazement at how many in the military, but especially in Pacific Command, acted like they were somehow running our relationship with China-as though they were somehow in control of all the connectivity that was emerging so rapidly between our two economies. Bud would just laugh in sheer amazement at such idiocy, describing the unflinching hubris of those who'd make this claim. And I've heard that same bewildered chuckle from CEOs ever since.

But the notion persists in Honolulu. PACOM is really under the delusion that its network of military ties in the region somehow trumps all over realities, just like Washington is so persistently under the delusion that somehow it runs the region diplomatically. This is the essential curse of many who labor in the U.S. Government: they have almost no idea how the real world works. They think government accounts for about 90 percent of reality on the planet, with the U.S. government supplying the bulk of that. And what they cannot control they naturally fear. China is not controlled by America, much less PACOM, but we need a better reason to presume inevitable war than that.

Kaplan, of course, supplies no such rationales, simply swallowing-gulp after gulp-every bit of fear mongering fed to him by a series of strategic analysts whose sole purpose in life-it would appear-is to make PACOM seem like the center of the power universe.

Wait until Kaplan visits Southern Command. Then we can hear about how South American drug lords really run America unbeknownst to the simple-minded citizenry living here.

We are told by Michael Vickers, former Green Beret and now with CSIS, that "getting into a war with China is easy." There are "many scenarios," but let's not bother with the logic of any of those, let's just jump to the real question we need to deal with: as Vickers puts it, "How do you end a war with China?"

The answer? Regime change, of course. This is the cool, mechanical logic of the unimpassioned military minds in Honolulu, so much more sane than those crazy Wilsonian neo-conservatives in DC. I mean, those guys just wanted Saddam's head, whereas these guys want to take down the entire Chinese Communist Party because . . . well . . . how else to end the war?

I know, I know. I'm skipping bits here and there in the logic, but that's the whole point of Kaplan's piece. Screw all the plausibility shit, let's get right to the good stuff!

Ah, but Kaplan does show some sense by actually running some numbers. We have a navy that's about 2.86 million tons of displacement, armed with the highest high-tech gear in the universe. China's scary navy weighs in at about 0.263 million tons, or roughly one-tenth our sheer fighting weight. We have 24 aircraft carriers (if we count both the regular ones and the Marines' big decks) whereas the Chinese have . . . none.

But I forget China's sheer proximity advantage, do I not? America has to send its warships to China, whereas China has only to sit there waiting for them to come!

But all these stats are meaningless (and don't even get me started how much better our Army, Marines, and Air Force are than anything China has to offer, because-of course-this is PACOM's wet dream of future war), because, as Kaplan tells us, Athens once had a huge naval advantage over Sparta about a billion years ago and after they fought a war for 27 years, Sparta won!

Geez! With China's advantage in sheer proximity and our clear disadvantage in having a much larger and far more technologically advanced navy, we should get the hell out of Asia right now and hope the Chinese don't want Cuba any time soon! I mean, it'll be the first thing to go after Honolulu and the Panama Canal in this decades-long war that Kaplan is dreaming up.

But I am thinking too small, obviously, because China will whip our asses in clever, asymmetrical warfare. Yes, Kaplan intones ominously, "the Chinese are poised to show us the high end of the art" of Fourth Generation Warfare. Kaplan doesn't call it 4GW here, because he's whoring so amazingly well for the navy that it would be bad form to mention a concept so near and dear to ground forces.

We are told that the Chinese are studying our military! No, really! As opposed to, say, the Argentine navy. Myopic but clever, these Chinese.

So what can we expect? Kaplan warns of "specific demonstrations of strength," like China's 2001 downing of our navy EP-3E surveillance plane. Whoa doggy! Sounds like Bob got the inside dope on that amazing feat of technical prowess! Of course, anyone who knows anything about the actual story might be a bit less impressed with the Chinese threat on that basis, but hey, that's the whole point of fear-mongering to the uniformed: keep them stupid, keep them scared. I mean, without journalists like Kaplan, Americans might fear the world less, and if Americans feared the world less, who would read Bob Kaplan?

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying Mr. Kaplan is biased here in a self-interested sense, I'm sticking with my original charge that he's whoring himself like few journalists ever have at the hands of the U.S. military.

But if you're not impressed with the EP-3E slap-in-the-face, then try on Bob's second example: "During one of our biennial Rim of the Pacific naval exercises the Chinese could sneak a sub under a carrier battle group and then surface it." They could also shoot missile rounds at a moving target in the Pacific to show they could do that, or . . . "they could also bump up against one of our ships during one of our ongoing Freedom of Navigation exercises off the Asian coast."

Holy shit! I'd never thought of the last one. That is like . . . I dunno . .. some amazing anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategy I've never heard of before. Wonder why the Sovs never tried anything that devious?

Did I mention that Bob mentioned that China and Russia mentioned that they are going to have a joint military exercise? CANYOUBELIEVEIT! I mean, America exercises with almost every navy in Asia except China's and Beijing has the gall to invite the Russians, who still have at least two or three floating ships, to a joint exercise! I mean, really!

Bob's answer to this rising Chinese naval challenge is for America to develop three navies. F--k the Army and Marines and Air Force. We need THREE NAVIES! Count 'em and weep ground-pounders and fly boys!

We need a navy to work the littorals, a big one to bomb stuff ashore, and another to sneak around and keep those Chinese guessing. We're building the small craft for the first navy and have the carriers already for the second, so we really need to concentrate on the third, and here's where Kaplan goes down with the submarine community by claiming that the only thing standing between us and total Chinese domination of the future is lots and lots of submarines-both diesel and nuclear. Bob admits they present a crappy payload and cost way too much, but we need them to protect our carriers because, Kaplan, employing some high-end 4GW logic, claims that "the effect of a single Chinese cruise missile's hitting a U.S. carrier, even if it did not sink the ship, would be politically and psychologically catastrophic, akin to al-Qaeda's attacks on the Twin Towers."

I take back my previous comment about Kaplan's flogging PACOM's genius for strategic thought. That last quote is now-officially-the stupidest f--king thing I have ever heard in my career.

The rest of the piece is grotesque PACOM propaganda thinly disguised as Kaplanesque strategic travelogue.

You know, I was going to say a word or two about Robert Kagan's vague, fear-mongering bit of an op-ed on China in Sunday's Washington Post, but frankly, why bother with a strategic personality tick when you have a full-blown mental disorder on display like the logic in this piece.

The saddest thing about this article is that The Atlantic Monthly published it. God, if I tried to shove anything this goofy past Mark Warren at Esquire, he'd just laugh me off and remove my name from the masthead. It's embarrassing, this piece, far more to The Atlantic Monthly than to Kaplan himself. He's got to write this sort of junk because that's what he's known for and once you establish the reputation as a brilliant fear-monger, baby, just do what you gotta do! But The Atlantic Monthly should know better than that.

Kaplan keeps writing scary stuff the military loves (and they do love it), and in return they keep treating him like the ultimate journalist-pet. It is a match made in heaven. As "strategic thinkers" go, Kaplan is the ultimate self-licking ice cream cone: the more you swallow, the better it tastes!

This piece is almost enough to make me take back every snide comment I've ever made about my former idol Tom Friedman (whom I adored until 9/11 pushed him to the Dark Side of the Force), and I would too, if his new book wasn't hyping China as an economic threat.

I guess Friedman at least offers an alternative to Kaplan's-same enemy, but different fear!

In the end, we need to be an America that's good and talented and true not because we fear the outside world, but because that's how good and talented and true we really are as a nation. The future worth creating is the answer, not the war worth waging nor the collapse worth avoiding.

Social workers will tell you that every child grows up thinking the entire world is just like their family. If that's true, ask yourself what sort of American family we're raising with all this fear mongering.

Feed your head, and the rest will follow. Dine on strategic junk food, and you won't like what you see in the mirror.

Geez. Take a cold shower and pop a half-dozen Prozac pills, you buffoon. Look, I wasn't too enthusiastic over Kaplan's piece in this month's Atlantic either, but he makes some interesting points nevertheless.

You, on the other hand, seem to be on some kind of Angry Pill.

This piece fails to impress me with anything other than its vulgarity. Perhaps Mr. Barnett could have tried presenting a list of items from Mr. Kaplan's piece, and then tried writing coherent thoughts about their strengths and weaknesses.

Instead, his billingsgate is merely tiresome.

A couple of months ago a FReeper (sorry I forget who) said he's met Barrnett and that he was not the nicests person he's ever met.

I'm going to keep an eye open to see if Kaplan replies. This could make for an enlightening debate.

China will be advantaged-somehow-by the fact that the envisioned battlefields (or waters) are really, really close to their shores and really, really distant from ours. This is the opening logic on display in this piece. What an advantage to have war in your front yard as opposed to your alleged enemy's front yard!

Whatever Barnett wants to say about that, it is indisputably an advantage that China's supply lines and lines of reinforcement are much shorter than ours. It is not an advantage that guarantees a particular outcome, but it is an advantage. So it's kind of strange that Barnett is attempting to argue otherwise.

Length of supply lines is more of a landwar concept. It IS important when considering naval warfare, but only if both sides have a navy.

America couldn't lose a sea-war with China, except politically (the Chinese could get lucky and sunburn a carrier, which might make a Democrat President blink).

Conversely China couldn't lose a land-war with anyone they were right next to, unless a sea-route was involved. But the Chinese couldn't win a land war against anyone further off. They couldn't even beat France (!) as they couldn't move their army all the way there.

There are reasons for caution though. East Aisan investment in Military warships is going to up to about 15B per year by 2007. That's India and South Korea as well as China, but there is obviously good reason for the US to keep a vastly bigger Navy than all the competition put together. Once you lose sea superiority, you stop being the Superpower.

Isn't it an advantage that it is easier for them to refuel and rearm their planes, ships and submarines than it is for us to refuel and rearm ours?

What happened to this loon did he get fired by the Navy or something. Talk about reams of babble and irrelevant criticism this takes the cake. Was there a nit he missed picking?

"In the end, we need to be an America that's good and talented and true not because we fear the outside world, but because that's how good and talented and true we really are as a nation. The future worth creating is the answer, not the war worth waging nor the collapse worth avoiding.

Social workers will tell you that every child grows up thinking the entire world is just like their family. If that's true, ask yourself what sort of American family we're raising with all this fear mongering. "

What a moron. This is a liberal puff piece to feed their bizarre world view. The new 'progressive' tactic.. Criticize, psychologize, but offer nothing in return.

In spite of Barnett, the Navy offers the best choice for America. Iraq has demonstrated the manpower and insurgency limits of Rumsfeld's 'old warfare' of bomb, invade and occupy.

Mobile and missle armed, the Navy is the future. We can control, we don't have to occupy. As an 'old warfare' army grunt, I bow to the Navy. The days of boots on the ground are gone forever. Thank God.

We can control, we don't have to occupy. As an 'old warfare' army grunt, I bow to the Navy. The days of boots on the ground are gone forever. Thank God.

Why does it have to be "either or"? Why not "both and"?

"except politically (the Chinese could get lucky and sunburn a carrier, which might make a Democrat President blink). "

I assume the PLA has put lots of time into working out how to try to do this in the opening move of open hostilities with the US. I do not have the technical knowledge to comment; some freepers dismiss it completely, others do not.

What happened to this loon did he get fired by the Navy or something...

Actually, yes he did.
"Pentagon's New Map" author Thomas Barnett forced to depart War College.

Mr. Barnett's criticism is impossible to get a handle on. It has a breathless, unfocused quality about it. Robert Kaplan has written some good stuff, IMHO. I'll be sure to lookup the piece in question and judge for myself.

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