This Wall Street Journal ($) article reports on an interesting area of Pentagon research that is not discussed much in the mainstream media — that is, the fundamental shift that has taken place over the past generation in the theory behind the way in which American military forces fight wars.
The WSJ article focuses on Thomas Barnett, a 41 year old obscure Defense Department analyst, teamed up with senior executives at the Wall Street firm Cantor Fitzgerald LP in 1998 to study how globalization was changing national security. The entire WSJ article is well worth reading, and the following are a few tidbits to whet your appetite:

One scenario [Mr. Barnett and his associates] studied was a meltdown caused by the Y2K computer bug followed by terrorist attacks designed to exploit the chaos. Mr. Barnett posited that Wall Street would shut down for a week. Gun violence, racially motivated attacks and sales of antidepressants would surge. The U.S. military would find itself embroiled in brushfire conflicts across the developing world.

His theories were met with skepticism. “People began referring to me as the Nostradamus of Y2K,” Mr. Barnett says.
Then came the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Suddenly Mr. Barnett didn’t look so crazy.

Accordingly, at the urging of certain Pentagon researchers, Mr. Barnett overhauled the concept to address more directly the post-9/11 world and condensed it into a three hour PowerPoint briefing. As a result, Mr. Barnett has become a key figure in the debate currently raging about what the modern military should look like. Senior military officials say his controversial ideas are influencing the way the Pentagon views its enemies, vulnerabilities and future structure. The WSJ article notes:

Mr. Barnett’s military is a far cry from the shape of today’s armed forces. Instead of a single force to wage wars and rebuild nations, Mr. Barnett envisions two. The first, which he dubs “Leviathan,” would be hard-hitting, ready to take on conventional foes such as Saddam Hussein on a moment’s notice. The second, more unconventional force of “System Administrators” would focus on bringing dysfunctional states into the mainstream through the type of nation-building operations seen in Iraq, the Balkans and Eastern Africa. It wouldn’t only mop up after wars but would travel the world during peacetime building local security forces and infrastructure.

You will never discover in the mainstream media that Defense Secretary Rumsfeld is one of the reasons why Mr. Barnett’s theories are seeing the light of day:

Mr. Barnett conjured up his vision at the urging of Retired Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski. After 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tapped the admiral to run a new office in the Pentagon, dubbed the Office of Force Transformation, focusing on changing the military, one of Mr. Rumsfeld’s pet projects.

In Mr. Barnett’s world, countries are divided into two categories. His “core” countries are part of a global community linked by trade, migration and capital flows. Europe, the U.S., India and China fall into this group. Then there are “gap” countries that either refuse to join the global mainstream (such as Saudi Arabia and Iran), or are unable to because they have no central government or are struggling with debilitating crises (such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and much of sub-Saharan Africa).
“The “gap” is a petri dish of grief, repression, terrorism and disease,” says Adm. Cebrowski. “And 9/11 shows we can’t wall ourselves off from it.”
To join those worlds together, Mr. Barnett envisions two different military forces. The Leviathan force consists of stealthy submarines, long-range bombers and highly trained soldiers who are “young, unmarried and slightly p- off,” Mr. Barnett says.
The System Administrator force is named for the technology wonks who run corporate computer networks. This force is focused on training “gap state” security forces, stamping out insurgencies and rebuilding basic infrastructure such as legal systems and power grids.
That force would include lightly armored soldiers, the Marine Corps and officials from the State, Justice and Commerce departments along with the U.S. Agency for International Development. Its troops would be older and more specialized than the Leviathans. The purpose of the System Administrators would be to bring order to a country, but the force would also be strong enough to defend itself.

The Pentagon is a notoriously tradition-bound organization where new ideas that do not come through the normal chain of command are viewed by Pentagon generals with skepticism. Nevertheless, over the past 30 years, the Pentagon has increasingly embraced intellectual ideas from non-conventional sources.
For example, Andrew Marshall in the late 1970’s and early 80’s argued from an obscure Pentagon office that wars could be revolutionized by precision bombs, unmanned planes and wireless communications that would allow the American military to destroy enemies from a distance. Similarly, the work of the late Pentagon iconoclast John Boyd and his acolytes in revolutioning the way in which the American military approaches war in the late 20th and early 21st century has been well-chronicled in Robert Coram’s book, “Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War.
As we evaluate the performance of America’s military leaders in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, it is important to remember that things are not always as they seem in regard to the American military.
For example, the Pentagon brass fought tooth and nail against the innovative ideas of people such as Boyd, Marshall, and now Barnett, primarily because their ideas often run contrary to the sacred cow military appropriations that the Pentagon hierarchy aggressively protect.
On the other hand, you will not learn from the mainstream media that it took leaders such as Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and Colin Powell over the past two decades to open up and accept recommendations from lower Pentagon sources such as Boyd and Marshall that have revolutionized and dramatically improved America’s ability to conduct war in places such as Afghanistan and Iraq. But for the willingness of leaders such as Messrs. Rumsfeld, Cheney and Powell to listen to these unconventional sources of information, the traditional Pentagon brass would have squelched those innovative ideas before they would have ever seen the light of day.
Consequently, for those who are calling for the heads of Messrs. Rumsfeld and Cheney, I give this advice: Be very careful what you wish for.