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PREFACE: A FUTURE WORTH CREATING
A grand strategy requires a grand vision, and that is what I sought to provide in my first book, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. The response to that book within the U.S. defense community was, and continues to be, overwhelming, but likewise challenging. Long-range planners at various regional commands, as well as at the Pentagon, have embraced its global perspective and the strategic requirements for change that it portends, but they, like so many other readers, quickly cracked the code of the first book: the implied blueprint for action is simply so much larger than anything the Defense Department can manage. That was the book’s great limitation:
it explained the world’s fundamental dynamics—or the rule sets that govern globalization—as viewed from the military outward, and many nonmilitary readers were left wondering how they and their communities could join this larger effort to reshape the international security environment upon which all economic activity and political stability ultimately depend. Some readers, too, had difficulties with points regarding the use of force, believing that no discussion of peace can ever admit rationales for war. In reality, of course, security is necessary but never sufficient for lasting peace.
That first volume related how globalization has spread to encompass two-thirds of the world’s population, defined as the global economy’s Functioning Core, and how one-third of humanity remains trapped outside this peaceful sphere in regions that are weakly connected to the global economy, or what I call the Non-Integrating Gap. Since the end of the Cold War, all the wars and civil wars and genocide have occurred within the Gap, and so my vision of ending war “as we know it” begins with shrinking this Gap and ends with making globalization truly global and eradicating the disconnectedness that defines danger in the world today.
at Amazon.Click here for Blueprint for Action
Posted by Critt Jarvis at 12:33 PM
A grand strategy requires a grand vision, and that is what I sought to provide in my first book, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century. The response to that book within the U.S. defense community was, and continues to be, overwhelming, but likewise challenging. Long-range planners at various regional commands, as well as at the Pentagon, have embraced its global perspective and the strategic requirements for change that it portends, but they, like so many other readers, quickly cracked the code of the first book: the implied blueprint for action is simply so much larger than anything the Defense Department can manage. That was the book’s great limitation:
it explained the world’s fundamental dynamics—or the rule sets that govern globalization—as viewed from the military outward, and many nonmilitary readers were left wondering how they and their communities could join this larger effort to reshape the international security environment upon which all economic activity and political stability ultimately depend. Some readers, too, had difficulties with points regarding the use of force, believing that no discussion of peace can ever admit rationales for war. In reality, of course, security is necessary but never sufficient for lasting peace.
That first volume related how globalization has spread to encompass two-thirds of the world’s population, defined as the global economy’s Functioning Core, and how one-third of humanity remains trapped outside this peaceful sphere in regions that are weakly connected to the global economy, or what I call the Non-Integrating Gap. Since the end of the Cold War, all the wars and civil wars and genocide have occurred within the Gap, and so my vision of ending war “as we know it” begins with shrinking this Gap and ends with making globalization truly global and eradicating the disconnectedness that defines danger in the world today.
at Amazon.Click here for Blueprint for Action
Posted by Critt Jarvis at 12:33 PM