anyone interested in the military anyone concerned about global affairs anyone. Bottom line is you should read it. Thomas P. M. Barnett is, without mincing words, brilliant.
If you don’t have the patience to read a book you should, at least check out his blog.
One thing I wish he would write about — how should we look at media in context of the core-gap divide? (If you are confused, read the book.) And what happens when fundamentalists in the gap start using media (television, cell phones, blogs, online forums, YouTube, etc.) to advance their agenda?
Have you read Blueprint for Action, yet? It’s been slow going for me on his second book. I keep having to put it down because he’s pissing me off, but that’s probably good. Positive change often requires uncomfortable ideas. I’ll decide for sure after I finish it.
I have not. (Hangs head).
Things have been a bit busy between graduate school, switching jobs and other stuff going on in my life. But it is on my list to read.
Would love to read a review when you are done.
Not quite ready for a review, yet. But I’ll give you a thought on it.
The biggest point I’m struggling with is Barnett’s instance that we must bifurcate the DoD into his Leviathan/SysAdmin model. It just doesn’t seem practical to me. I may be suffering from some parochialism, but it seems that such a split violates many of the economies that have been attained through Goldwater-Nichols and since.
Applying another thought, I came across a paper on the Democrat Leaderships Coucil site that suggested replacing the UN with an expanded NATO. Concatentating these ideas, I’ve been thinking that a proper course of action might be to establish the (very reformed) UN as the manager of SysAdmin activities. One of those reforms would be to remove the collective security responsibilites from the UN and bestow them on an expanded NATO, or a new organization (acceptible to Russia) with NATO as it’s seed/template. UN-SysAdmin, NATO-Leviathan.
hey.. nice post man.