The Dawn of the Integral Age

Haiti needs the SysAdmin 2010-Jan-14 at 11:14 PST

It’s clear to me, and to our top-level military planners, that we need to have both a war-fighting force and a peace-making and reconnection force, which Thomas Barnett calls the SysAdmin.

Our efforts in Iraq since 2004, and our efforts in Afghanistan starting in 2009, have been all about building the capabilities required to effectively run the SysAdmin.

Unfortunately, because these first two efforts have come after our Leviathan, war-fighting capability has done its job, many people are resistant to it, simply because we’re doing it after fighting.

OK… so let’s do a SysAdmin effort – sustained reconnection, lasting 8-10 years, building government institutions and inviting FDI and connectivity – in Haiti.  Let’s do it where it wouldn’t be “tainted” by having invaded first (leaving aside for now the question of the conditions under which such invasions should be done).

Let’s do it where some of the American public wouldn’t be resistant to it up front.  Let’s do it in a way that invites other nations to participate, and trains them in what such an effort would ask of them.  Let’s do it where NGO’s other than the U.N. get involved.  Let’s do it where the only shooting we’ll be doing is against criminals, not “insurgents”.

Let’s get used to doing it, because we’re going to be doing it anyway, all over the world, for the next 40-50 years.  Let’s get the world used to it, comfortable with it, and expecting the benefits of it.

I’m not sending any text messages to send $5 to Haiti.  It doesn’t matter.  This does.  Let’s all get behind a serious, mature, well-conceived, long-term SysAdmin effort in Haiti to once-and-for-all move that nation up from the hell it was even before the earthquake to a fully-connected part of a globalized world.