[R-G] The Pentagon looks back to four great empires for tips on how to rule the world

[Anthony Fenton]

Don't Know Much About History
Commentary: The Pentagon looks back to four great empires for tips on  
how to rule the world.
By Justin Elliott
August 4, 2008
http://www.motherjones.com/news/featurex/2008/07/dont-know-much-about-history.html

In the summer of 2002, the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA)  
published an 85-page monograph called "Military Advantage in History".  
Unusual for an office that is headed by Andrew Marshall, the  
Pentagon's "futurist in chief," the study looks back to the past—way  
back. It examines four empires, or "pivotal hegemonic powers in  
history," to draw lessons about how the United States "should think  
about maintaining military advantage in the 21st century." Though  
unclassified, the study was held close to the vest; a stamp on the  
cover limits its dissemination without permission. Mother Jones  
obtained it only through a Freedom of Information Act request. Though  
the report is far from revelatory, it provides a window into a mindset  
that unselfconsciously envisions the United States as the successor to  
some of history's most powerful empires.

The study looks a little like a high school text book, devoting  
chapters to Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and  
Napoleonic France and citing texts by Sun Tzu, Livy, and Jared  
Diamond. It attempts to break down exactly how historic empires  
sustained their military might across continents and even centuries.  
The study posits that the historical examples offer "insights into  
what drives U.S. military advantage," as well as "where U.S.  
vulnerabilities may lie, and how the United States should think about  
maintaining its military advantage in the future." There is no one  
secret to world domination, however. The Mongols' military advantage  
was rooted in their "tactical and operational superiority"; the  
Macedonians' in the "exceptional leadership" of and "cult of  
personality" surrounding Alexander the Great; Napoleon's in  
"innovative operational concepts" and "information superiority"; and  
the Romans' in "robust tactical doctrine" and "strong domestic  
institutions" which were "designed to incorporate conquered peoples as  
the empire grew." In an extraordinary passage, the study cites the  
Roman experience—from over a millennium ago—as a precedent for  
America's long-term dominance: "The Roman model suggests that it is  
possible for the United States to maintain its military advantage for  
centuries if it remains capable of transforming its forces before an  
opponent can develop counter-capabilities. Transformation coupled with  
strong strategic institutions is a powerful combination for an  
adversary to overcome."

The report's language is jargon laden and opaque—a lance used by  
Macedonian horsemen is referred to as a "primary weapon system." That  
may be due to the methodology of "net assessment," a fancy term for  
the ONA's approach to analyzing complicated real-world situations that  
is rooted in systems analysis and game theory. Military author James  
Dunnigan compares it to engineering. "You take apart historical  
events, reassemble them as a simulation, and then tinker with the  
simulation until you can recreate the historical event accurately," he  
explains. "What that allows you to do is play out 'what if?'  
situations: What if Napoleon did this? What if Ghengis Khan did that?"

While the study was produced under the auspices of the ONA, its five  
authors work for government intelligence contractor Booz Allen  
Hamilton, and they wrote the study as part of a contract for the  
Defense Department's Information Assurance Technology Analysis Center.  
Booz Allen won a 10-year, $200 million cost-plus contract to establish  
and "host" that center in 1998. (In May, the Carlyle Group announced  
it will be taking over Booz Allen's government services arm.)

The original idea for the study predates the Bush administration. Mark  
Herman, the Booz Allen vice president and war-game designer who is the  
study's lead author, recalls being asked to give a presentation on  
historical empires at one of Andrew Marshall's famous "summer studies"  
at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1999. At that  
annual retreat, experts from government, academia, and beyond are  
invited to contemplate a big-picture question. Newt Gingrich, for  
example, participated in the 1999 program, according to Herman. He  
says that the ONA "liked the presentation so much they felt it should  
be written down" and expanded. A earlier version of the report, titled  
"Sustaining Military Dominance: Examples From Ancient History," was  
presented at the 2001 summer study and was later cited in a Maureen  
Dowd column. The current version was published a year later.

Coming out of the Office of Net Assessment, the study's theme of  
military transformation is not surprising. Described by the Washington  
Post as "an obscure but highly influential unit," the ONA was  
established as an in-house think tank in 1973. Its founding director  
was Marshall, a strategist who achieved demigod status in the press  
after years of colorful profiles portraying him as a visionary. (A  
2002 article in the New York Times Magazine named Marshall the "Yoda  
of the Rumsfeld Defense Department"; William Safire dubbed him "the  
freshest mind in the Puzzle Palace.") ONA specializes in trend  
spotting and forecasting military threats. The office spent the 1980s  
exhaustively studying the US-Soviet balance; recently, it has turned  
to topics as diverse as neuropharmacology, Islamic warfare, and the  
national security implications of climate change.

Now in his 80s, Marshall has been a chief proponent of the so-called  
Revolution in Military Affairs, a cause also championed by Donald  
Rumsfeld that emphasizes speed and increased use of precision weapons  
and advanced communications technology. In 2001, Marshall was given a  
high-profile assignment by Rumsfeld to conduct an extensive review of  
the military and the possibilities of military transformation.

Most striking is how the study conceives of the United States in  
imperial terms. "You'll see some neoconservatives at the beginning of  
the Bush administration crowing that 'we do have an empire, let's just  
come out of the closet and say we do,'" said Ivan Eland, the author of  
a book on America's "informal empire" and the director of the Center  
on Peace & Liberty at the Independent Institute, on hearing a  
description of the study. "But the administration never did that  
because empire doesn't sell well with the public." After reviewing the  
study at Mother Jones' request, William Hartung, director of the Arms  
and Security Initiative at the New America Foundation, said he was  
struck by its "arrogance and immorality." "The presumption that the  
United States should rule the world, sword at the ready, for the  
foreseeable future is an unacceptable basis for a just, even-handed  
foreign policy."

Even coming from an office vaunted for its intellectual seriousness,  
"Military Advantage in History" often reads like it was meant as  
window dressing for the Revolution in Military Affairs agenda— 
sometimes at the expense of historical fact. (Herman says that the  
theme of transformation emerged naturally from his research.) After  
reviewing a section that identifies five discrete "transformations" of  
the Roman military over a period of 1,000 years, Lee Brice of Western  
Illinois University, president of the Society of Ancient Military  
Historians, described it as "so completely incorrect as to be  
useless." In general, Brice noted, "it is inappropriate to apply  
modern concepts of systems theory, doctrine, and strategy to ancient  
armies. That required a level of planning and centralization that  
simply did not exist."

Eland speculates that a study like this would "get warped by the  
military-industrial-congressional complex into more money for  
weapons." Furthermore, he says, it ignores the economic implications  
of military expansion. "The Office of Net Assessment is doing this to  
show, 'Well, gee, these other empires transformed themselves, they  
were successful, we need to do the same thing,'" Eland says. "Well  
that's going to cost big bucks, and that will cause economic  
overstretch. People say it can't happen to us since we have such a big  
economy, but every empire has said that." It is unclear how the study  
has been used; the Office of Net Assessment declined a request for an  
interview. Herman says only that "a whole bunch of [copies] went out  
to the government."

The idea that contemporary society can or should try to find direct  
guidance in the past has been assailed by some historians. The  
American historian Bernard Bailyn wrote of "an obvious kind of  
presentism, which at its worst becomes indoctrination by historical  
example." But the ONA study charges ahead, plumbing the past for  
contemporary lessons. An extraordinary color-coded table in the  
study's conclusion attempts to literally "map" the historical findings  
to the United States with an eye toward "enduring dominance." (See  
image above.)

Several historians who reviewed the study differed on its quality and  
meaning. Walter Scheidel, a Stanford professor of classics and the  
coauthor of a forthcoming survey of ancient empires, called it "a  
successful distillation of relevant information and scholarship  
complemented by very interesting systematic analysis." Others found  
the scholarship to be shoddy and superficial. Pamela Crossley, a  
Dartmouth historian who teaches on the Mongols, described the chapter  
on Genghis Khan as mostly "an accumulation of popularly transmitted  
misconceptions." She also noted the study's "amazingly strange  
spelling 'Chengis.'" Brice, the ancient military historian, said the  
text suffered from "an intense, myopic habit of wanting to make the  
ancient world fit into modern stereotypes." He compares it with "much  
lower-undergraduate-level work."

Justin Elliott, a former senior fellow at Mother Jones, is news editor  
at Talking Points Memo.