Barnett’s on a roll. This passage is excellent:

We’ll move down the hydrocarbon chain, for sure, but our dependence on the world at large is unlikely to be much diminished. But in the end, all that says is that we have to fix that world and that we have to live with “these people.” Resilience cannot be hoarded.

This reminded me of one of the first posts I wrote here, - going all the way back to December 2005:

…the Gap’s threat to us is why we need to shrink it. “Shrinking the Gap” is a sustainable solution. “Avoiding the Gap” is shoving the problem into the closet, locking the door and hoping the walls hold.

Back to Barnett:

We’ll all be forced to continue getting it on the Gap in general. There is no independence in the classic sense once you embrace globalization. And if you choose isolation, then there will be only the slow decay that grows more rapid with time (what we watch in all such disconnected states, no matter their brave fronts and their fiery rhetoric). All this talk about power shifting to oil producers is overblown. They are a scenario to be discounted–financially, politically, militarily, technologically. That much is true. But that’s no real power, because these states are far more dependent on our consumption than vice versa.

We face declining economies and standards of living if we try to isolate ourselves from the global market, while there are compelling moral and pragmatic reasons to engage with the Gap. Recognizing the interdependence means that we’re going to have to find ways to deal with the Gap.

Very satisfying to look back on the stuff I was writing last year and still feel like it’s making sense.

DNI has an interesting review of Terrorist Trail: Backtracking the Foreign Fighter , John Poole’s latest’s book. It included one of the most concrete and succinct descriptions of 4GW I’ve ever encountered:

Fourth generation war is marked by non-national networked entities who provide too few targets for bombing to have any effect other than the effect of creating more recruits for their ranks. 4GW forces thrive on devastation and insecurity of the people; increasing the devastation and insecurity, as in with most military approaches, is counterproductive in that they do nothing more than create greenhouses for terror. What are needed, according to Poole, are small near-autonomous units of truly light infantry that can play the role of police force rather than occupiers in the greenhouses of terror. It requires a military paradigm shift away from centralized control and micromanagement…

One of the flaws in much current thinking on command and control (C2) is that no matter how much people say the organizational structure matters more than technology, the majority of the resources are spent on technological solutions such as knowledge management systems. Poole apparently gets this; I’ll have to put his book on my reading list.

One quibble with DNI, though. It announces that Mark Hord’s review is “Special to Defense and the National Interest,” yet when I popped over to Amazon to learn more about the book I found a verbatim copy of Hord’s review. It really isn’t necessary to claim exclusive content in order to provide value. I find out about more books through DNI than Amazon because DNI reflects my interests better than Amazon’s algorithms do, regardless of whether DNI’s reviews are unique. So why make a stronger claim, especially when it isn’t true?

Barnett’s summary of Chavez had me laughing out loud.

Chavez is eating his seed corn and devouring it fast. He’s living on high oil prices, which fuel 85% of his export revenues and half of his country’s income. But no, he’s not creating any new socialism. It’s the same old, same old for this latest “big man” to rule in South America.

It reminded me of an Eddie Izzard bit:

[Discussing Hitler’s attempt to invade Russia] Napoleon had been steaming in there 100 years before: “I’m going to kill them, I’m going to kill them, going to… Oh, it’s a bit cold, it’s a bit cold. Right! Ok, ok, bad idea.” And then Hitler, “I’ve got a better idea, got a better idea… Oh, it’s the same idea! It’s the same idea, it’s the same idea…”

Happy Friday everyone.