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September 15, 2005
Market-states, Netwar and "Ebay-style command systems"
On many occasions, loyal readers, I have referred you to the brilliant work by Philip Bobbitt, The Shield of Achilles, which is about the relationship between constitutional order and warfare, and the different forms that the state has taken over the past five hundred years: princely state, kingly state, territorial state, state-nation, nation-state, and now, market-state. It is pure genius. I highly recommend it. The only thing that has kept me from reviewing it in full is that it is nearly 800 pages and so broad-ranging that I'm sure I would miss more than a few important things. For the moment, I'll give the briefest of overviews, which is only fair because it illuminates much of my thinking here on the blog.
Here's the central thesis in my own paraphrased words: the state was created as one strategic innovation of warfare. Since then, as warfare evolved, the constitutional order of states has evolved with it. Along the way, there have been several "epochal wars," during which the strategic innovations of warfare resulted in a new constitutional order. During the 20th century, the period from 1914 to 1990 was one such epochal war. The constitutional order in play was that of the nation-state. The three alternatives of nation-state were fascism, parliamentarism, and communism, all of which each promised to maximize the welfare of a given nation, through one means or another. During that war, the Long War of the 20th century, the states involved made strategic innovations to win -- three in particular: nuclear weapons, rapid computation, and global communcations (in the broadest sense: the movement of people, ideas, materiel etc). These same three strategic innovations, which were essential to winning the Long War of the nation-state, now undermine that same society of states. The new constitutional order will be that of the market-state. Governments will no longer seek to maximize the welfare of a given nation, but will instead maximize the opportunities of citizens.
That in a nutshell is the argument and I think it rings true in many, many ways. First off, Bobbitt has jettisoned the prevalent view of history: that the nation-state has been in existence since the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and is now being rent asunder by global capitalism, which drives all things before it. This view, the prevailing one in the academic world, is inherently Marxist. It says that capitalism is the root cause of everything: culture, politics, societal breakdown . . . And it says that "all that is solid melts into air," which leaves much to be desired in terms of giving hope for the future of the human race. Bobbitt instead argues differently: it is not capitalism that drives everything. Instead, he would claim that war is the driving force in human history. This is a classical view, a classically liberal view, it is a breath of fresh air, and it is fascinating.
Bobbitt believes that the market-state will rely less on legal regulation and laws to solve policy problems, and will instead rely more on market-based incentives to accomplish its goals. In a sense he comes full circle: capital is not the defining element of life, war is. But capitalism has blessed us with the best ways of organizing society, and now, in our continued drive to continue to prevent wars, we will rely on those market-based approaches to accomplish the aims of our Leviathan.
Now one wonders: how does this wide-ranging grand theory translate into everyday domestic politics? It might be easy to equate the market-state with the ultimate goal of libertarians, who wish for no central government whatsoever. But this would be incorrect. Bobbitt does not see markets as replacing states. He sees states as using markets to accomplish their goals, rather than grand government redistribution schemes, or bureaucratic means of making decisions. In fact, Bobbitt argues that the welfare state has been so discredited in recent years because it was part and parcel of the nation-state -- the state that promises to maximize the opportunities of a given nation. This is what both FDR and LBJ attempted to do with their programs. But the innovations which won the Long War -- nuclear weapons, rapid computation, and global communications -- have rendered a world in which no one nation, or ethnic group is clearly defined. One cannot seek to maximize the welfare of a given nation because one can no longer even define that nation. This is especially true in the United States, a multi-ethnic continental superpower.
My interpretation is that the Democrats, using multiculturalism, seek to maximize the welfare of every mini-nation which can be found in the US, but to the overall detriment to the whole. They use the tired old redistributive policies of the welfare state to accomplish this, but ultimately, the welfare state can never be as effective at maximizing welfare as the market can in maximizing opportunity. Here is where the GOP comes in. Contrary to the Democrats, the GOP has traditionally sought to maximize market opportunity, while at the same time enacting social policies that buttress a much narrower conception of one particular melting-pot American nation-state. So the effects of the market-state cut through both parties. I think the GOP is in a position to much more clearly adopt the concept of the market-state and implement policies based upon an understanding of its dynamics than are the Democrats.
In fact, guess who else has been reading Bobbitt?
In his new book, Winning the Future, Newt Gingrich dedicates a chapter to Entrepreneurial Public Management as a Replacement for Bureaucratic Public Administration. Sound familiar? Scroll down:
As Professor Philip Bobbitt of the University of Texas has noted: "Tomorrow's [nation] state will have as much in common with the 21st century multinational company as with the 20th century [nation] state. It will outsource many functions to the private sector, rely less of regulation and more on market incentives and respond to ever-changing consumer demand."Don't be deceived. Bobbitt's work is more about war and diplomacy than about turning the US into number one on the Fortune 500 list, with the President as CEO. But the analogy is not inappropriate, and is in fact the easiest part of the book to discuss in the public realm with our existing vocabulary of states, markets, and politics. Newt has merely latched on to this one aspect of the market-state.
But to get back to war . . . this is where the idea of the market-state is most fascinating. After all, our current military organizations are relics of the industrial age, and the welfare state. They are nation-state institutions. What will the military of the market-state look like? There are many answers, but I think the most interesting ones lie at the nexus of Bobbitt's work with that of two RAND researchers, Jon Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, who are the pioneers behind the concept of "netwar" (see The Advent of Netwar). The RANDsters describe the rise of network forms of organization as a direct result of the information society (read: Bobbitt's "global communications"), which break down hierarchies (read: bureaucratic government agency holdovers from the nation-state). Their work is fascinating, and has obviously been very influential. They have written a separate work postulating that "swarming" will be the doctrine of the future, because of the decentralized nature of warfighting organizations, based on dense and robust communications. Hugh Hewitt has quoted their work about swarming in his own book, Blog, to describe what he terms "blogswarms". And of course, the Marine Corps is developing something called "Distributed Operations," which General Hagee discussed at the American Enterprise Institute conference on The The Future of the United States Marine Corps:
Distributive operations, in my mind, as this lays out, is an additive capability and it's a logical extension of our warfare philosophy and that is maneuver warfare, and what we're talking about is taking several squads and rather than putting them ashore as a platoon, they may go to shore as a platoon but they would be spread out over a large area, and that squad leader would have the capability to call in kinetic fire, whether it's from air, sea or land, and coordinate those fires. Can you do it today? He has the capability but we haven't given him the education and training, and we are absolutely committed to doing that.One way of imagining distributed operations is a small market of interconnected actors, who are free to collaborate amongst themselves when convenient, all in pursuit of a common policy goal. This is the conceptual way to imagine how a market-state will implement its policies, as opposed to a libertarian utopia of all private-sector all-the-time. In fact, in a 2003 interview at Berkeley, Jon Arquilla even goes so far as to say:You take several of those squads and you can spread them out over a large area. You've got eyes on target. You can bring in kinetic fires, if so desired, and if it's high-intensity conflict, you find the gap in the enemy's lines, and here is the part that's different. You reaggregate that force as a platoon, as a company, as a battalion, as a regiment, and you shove that combat power through that gap, looking for the enemy's center of gravity.
It's a little bit what we're doing today. We don't have all the technologies. They've been invented, they're out there, we just don't have them yet. The technologies to ensure those squads are connected together. And we haven't provided the education and training to ensure that squad leader has everything he can to be that strategic corporal, to be that strategic sergeant on today's battlefield.
What David Ronfeldt and I have suggested in terms of organizational redesign is that we create many small units who, first of all, can communicate with each other, and secondly, with our automated, unmanned assets in the air and other aircraft or ships at sea that can provide fire support. We've also suggested a commanding general or admiral who will be able to observe all of this as it is under way. The true measure of generalship in the future will be the leader who watches, but doesn't control directly, who adjusts and corrects where necessary, but allows things to unfold in a natural way.Ebay style of command? Crazy right? Check this out, from an in-depth profile of Donald Rumsfeld by Thomas P.M. Barnett:I went so far as to suggest once that it would be nice if a general tried to move to an eBay-style command system in which he simply let it be known to his commanders of what Ronfeldt and I call these little pods and clusters out in the field -- if he simply gave them a list of all the things that mattered to him: a bridge, a town, an enemy unit, the battery of artillery. We assign point values to those, and he put them on his list for a certain amount of time, at a certain point value. Of course, this could be adjusted every day. Imagine a campaign in which the commander's intent was expressed in that fashion, as opposed to a stream of orders from one unit to the next. The efficiencies created would be absolutely enormous. And, frankly, we have the information technology today. EBay is the proof that we have an efficient auction system for allocating resources. Well, we could be doing that in the military realm as well. I'm only partly tongue in cheek about that; I think we could go to something very, very close to that, very much further away from traditional notions of command.
But perhaps most stunning are Rumsfeld's plans for something he calls the National Security Personnel System, which will radically redefine civilian and military service in the Defense Department, changing from a longevity-based system to a performance-based system. Already, radical new features of this plan have been field-tested in the Navy, where, in the past, so-called detailers told sailors where they were going on their next assignment-with little warning and like it or not. Eager to break that boneheaded tradition, the Navy is experimenting with an eBay-like online auction system in which individual servicemen and -women bid against one another for desired postings. As Admiral Vern Clark told me, "I've learned you can get away with murder if you call it a pilot program."How about them apples? The market-state, entrepreneurial public managment, netwar and swarming: all tied together, all right around the corner.So Clark is pioneering a system by which, instead of sending people to places they don't want to go on a schedule that plays havoc with their home life, "they're going to negotiate on the Web for jobs. The decision's going to be made by the ship and the guy or gal. You know, we're going to create a whole new world here."
The plan is designed to save the services money and effort by reducing early departures from the ranks by people who just can't take it anymore. The Navy's so-called "slamming" rate, meaning the percentage of job transfers against a person's will, has hovered at 30 to 35 percent in recent years. That means the Navy has been pissing off one third of its personnel on a regular basis. Now, under this program, the slamming rate is down to less than one percent. More profoundly, Clark's pilot program has already spread to the other services, and in turn could well change the very nature of civil service throughout the United States government.
Where will it end? Innovation in republican and democratic government is no stranger to the United States. We may yet come up with something wholly new, different, and better, even more so than the first attempts described above.
UPDATE: Newt also mentions Ebay, but in a different context (same link as above). I definitely think he has read Bobbitt's book:
Creating a citizen centered government using the power of the computer and the internet. The agrarian-industrial model of government saw the citizen as a client of limited capabilities and the government employee as the center of knowledge, decision and power. It was a bureaucrat-centered model of governance (much as the agrarian-industrial model of health was a doctor-centered model and the agrarian-industrial school was a teacher-centered model). The information age makes it possible to develop citizen centered models of access and information.The market-state will seek to maximize opportunity for its citizens.The Weather Channel and Weather.com are a good example of this new approach. The Weather Channel gathers and analyzes the data but it is available to you when you want it and in the form you need. You do not have to access all the weather in the world to discover the weather for your neighborhood tomorrow. You do not have to get anyone’s permission to access the system 24 hours a day 7 days a week. Google is another system of customer centric organization that is a model for government. You access Google when you want to and you ask it the question that interests you. Google may give you an answer that has over a million possibilities but you only have to use the one or two options that satiate your interest. Similarly Amazon.com and E-Bay are models of systems geared to your interests on your terms when you want to access them. Compare these systems with the current school room, the courthouse which is open from 8 to 5, the appointment at the doctor’s office on the doctor’s terms, the college class only available when the professor deigns to show up. Government is still mired in the pre-computer, pre-communications age. A key component of Entrepreneurial Public Management is to ask every morning what can be done to use computers, the internet, CDs, DVDs, teleconferencing, and other modern innovations to recenter the government on the citizen.
Posted by Chester at September 15, 2005 9:43 PM
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For a similar analysis circa 1991,see J Davidson et al,The Great Reckoning
Posted by: Rick at September 16, 2005 2:07 AM
Man that is a power of reading.
Posted by: deadmaus at September 16, 2005 5:52 AM
Interesting points, but I think they miss two things, particularly on the what and wherefore of multiculturalism.
First, the state has long been called the nation-state for a reason. Previously the prenational tribal and local organizations and the transnational imperial organizations were markedly different. Only with the combination of nation and state into a cohesive unity did the powerful nation-state gain strength and dominance as a political form. The nation-state continues to be dominant, but regions and peoples with with national cohesion--Africa and increasingly the Western World--find their states supplanted in power and moral authority by subnational allegiances to race and locality and transnational allegiances to religion, race, ethnicity, and the new multinational corporations.
Second, under these pressures, states may find themselves broken apart, a la the Old Yugoslavia. We find the state's authority under attack not just by military threats, but by, for example, illegal immigration. We have a megastate in the US and a hugely powerful economy, but subnational ethnic loyalties and economic forces (and a lack of political will stemming from a lack of national cohesion) have led to the abandonment of our southern border, in effect. We can rebuild New Orleans and attack and rebuild Iraq, but poor illiterate Mexicans undermine our national prestige on a daily basis. Likewise, we have the most powerful military on earth, but we're reduced to having contractors provide security to top US generals and officials in Iraq. These contracting organizations represent a threat to the nation-state as well, as they are more mobile and more malleable than nation-state-conscript armies, and they are also less under its control.
The nation-state--not the state as such--is coming to an end, as the nation is eclipsed by older and newer concepts of human identity, both subnational and transnational in nature.
Posted by: Roach at September 16, 2005 9:53 AM
Roach, you've effectivly summarized the prevailing arguments in academia about the end of the nation-state, and its beginning. See Martin Van Creveld's "The Rise and Decline of the State" for a full treatment of this idea.
Bobbitt doesn't view "contracting organizations" as a threat to the state, he sees them as something that states will eventually embrace, not to abandon their power, but to increase it.
Yes, the nation-state, not the state as such is coming to an end. Bobbitt would agree.
As to your first point, that the nation-state has been called such for a long time, Bobbitt shows pretty carefully that while that may be the case, the actual bases of legitimacy within different forms of the state have been very different over time, no matter what you call them. He invents his own taxonomy, which I mentioned above -- princely states, kingly states, territorial states, state-nations, nation-states and what he terms the market-state. I don't have his book at hand, but a closer look at these may be in order. I think he makes a compelling case.
Posted by: Chester at September 16, 2005 11:25 AM
Interesting post. I think Barnett has a nice phrase in "Pentagon's New Map" about how some of the people think your idea is totally nuts, and half of them can't get enough of the Kool-Aid. From when I tried reading Bobbitt a couple years ago, I read 200 pages in 2 months because I kept slamming the book every two pages to (metaphorically) scream at him for getting something important wrong. Maybe I'll give it another shot and it won't feel like such a complete house of cards.
Posted by: Tom at September 16, 2005 5:23 PM
Tom,
When reading these long texts, to me anyway, it's important to remember the danger of accepting a world-view, philosophy, or interpretation of history that attempts to explain everything. So, it's good to take it all with a grain of salt, so one doesn't drink too much of the Koolaid (to mix metaphors a bit).
Having said all that, I think he's onto something . . .
Posted by: Chester at September 16, 2005 7:01 PM
Roach, the predecessor to the Nation State was the Fuedal State. That grew out of the expansion of the City State, which in turn was the logical expansion of the clan/tribe system used by hunter/gatherers before they learned to dig holes in the ground and drop seeds in them.
Each 'Advance' in Social orginazation led to advances in technology and science that created a need for a new social orginazation.
The Military of the Commercial State will not be recognized as a military by todays standards. The 'Modern' military is the linear growth of the military of the Feudal age and the result of nationalism with it's massive, conscript armies.
Coporate States WILL NOT have geographic boundries like Nation States do.
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