SSTR

Professor James B. Ellsworth’s paper SysAdmin: Toward Barnett’s Stabilization and Reconstruction Force is now available online in PDF format. The paper is only ten pages (minus footnotes) and written in succinct, non-technical language, so it’s highly accessible to the general reader.

Jim Ellsworth sticks to a discussion of the central issues about SSTR ("Stability, Security, Transition and Reconstruction"), which Thomas P. M. Barnett terms "SysAdmin." One realizes from the paper that Barnett’s discussion about SSTR is highly projective. (The paper is also a good introduction to Barnett’s major arguments in Blueprint for Action, which owe much to the SSTR concept.)

Ellsworth stresses that SSTR is not new, and that no matter how you think about it, the DoD is moving ahead it. SSTR has profound implications for the US military -- indeed, for militaries in all major countries -- as well as US foreign policy. So I strongly recommend a reading of the paper.

The paper specifically addresses the key issue at this time about SSTR, which is whether it should have a military (“force structure”) or civilian structure.

Jim only mentions the issue that Barnett made much of in Blueprint for Action, which is "preemptive" SSTR. But the paper makes a clear distinction between preemptive SSTR and SSTR. It’s Barnett's discussion about preemptive SSTR that raised my hackles.

The idea behind preemptive SSTR is that if it’s waged judiciously it will avert or mitigate situations that lead to war. Yet in a world of national borders how does one wage “preemptive” stability, security, transition and reconstruction?

The US might wait for a natural disaster, such as the Tsunami, to deploy preemptive SSTR. But the US experience with the Bam, Iran earthquake points up an important fact:

It doesn’t necessarily follow that preemptive use of SSTR will avert or mitigate conditions that make the government of an underdeveloped country warlike or aggressive toward neighboring contries.

In any case, Jim’s paper sticks largely to a discussion of plain unvarnished SSTR while giving warning that the concept of preemptive SSTR is not something that Barnett concocted. So we can assume that as the discussion heats up about which agency will control SSTR, we will see the State Department marshalling their troops.

10:45 AM UPDATE - Letter from Jim Ellsworth in response to the above post:

Thanks, Pundita, for your comments. Actually, I do believe in preemptive SSTR -- but as you note, in a world of national borders that will in the overwhelming majority of cases be a matter of encouraging struggling governments to ask for our help in providing the short- to intermediate-term security necessary for intermediate term economic and long-term cultural development to take durable root. And here I would embrace your notion of the importance of restricting this to those meeting at least some minimum standard of commitment to the principles we stand for --or willing to be held to some defined standards of progress toward those principles. That is where Millennium Challenge comes in -- both in terms of the long-term Center of Gravity and of reasonable criteria for staying true to our principles as we work to shrink the Gap.

In some much smaller percentage of cases -- I would argue Sudan should be a case in point -- I would still endorse intervention whether the recipient national government wants it or not. But then that's not wholly SSTR, but rather something farther up the Range of Military Operations spectrum that by definition ends up having a big SSTR component anyhow (as I mention in the paper).

Of course for such a policy to be practical, we would need both a much larger Army (and USMC)--I still argue that this Administration's National Security Strategy requires a World War sized force (millions) to effectively execute--and, at least as important, a citizenry that understands we're at war, and going to have to be fighting that way literally for the survival of our way of life against the real "Axis of Evil" -- transnational terror, transnational organized crime, and kleptocracy -- for a generation at least.

And at the moment, we have neither.

BTW, "which agency will control SSTR" is, at least for the moment, officially settled: NSPD 44 assigns the role of Lead Agency for SSTR to State, and DoDD 3000.05 reinforces our (military's) supporting role. Of course war being merely the continuation of politics with the addition of other means, the result in politics -- like war -- is never final, so that certainly isn't meant to end the debate.