our age, small-sized problems were spilling rapidly into crises of strategy. One hot

our age, small-sized problems were spilling rapidly into crises of strategy. One hot battlefield instant - an explosion under an armorless truck, say - could freeze the operations of a billion-dollar division. Nearly everyone begins to ask, sometimes out loud: Why did that happen? Followed pretty quickly by: What the hell are we doing here? The little bombs were shaking more than the Humvees. Walking into the Pentagon, one is struck by cascading sensations of immensity and volume and, frankly, gravity. Surely, you reflect, there must be someone here with a plan for everything? But there was not; there is not now. Yet the massiveness, the ineffable historical density and weight of American power, is so breathtaking that its frequent impotence in the face of a changing world represents a particular and unforgettable and, well, searing shock. The soldiers who had experienced those cold, failing nights at the edge of superpower rippled with unease. This was the slim comfort of life inside big, old and lamed structures confronting the fast, blithe and unstoppable future. By 2009, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq settling into a low boil, America’s generals again began wondering what other cracks were spreading around the world. The Unknown and the Future seemed to have an uneasy parallel meaning. The diplomats worried about this too, of course, but with soldiers dying every day, the questions had a particular urgency for the military. The top of the command chain asked incessantly about what they might be missing. What fissures were running even through their own building, masked by its scale but waiting quietly to make their best plans look foolish and dangerous? And: How they could possibly confront this world with 30% less of what they had a decade ago? They made a few phone calls. | received one of them. vm It was hard not to notice, if you picked up one of those incoming queries from Washington and were asked to draft your views on how this uncertain world might be approached, that one of the main aims of the American military in recent years - reducing the number of terrorists - appeared to be backfiring. This was an irritating feature of many global problems. In spreading market capitalism ever wider, the world was also digging an ever wider moat between rich and poor, for instance. In trying to make the world modern with more connection we were, we found, lashing ourselves to some very unmodern risks. And in waging the most expensive war on terrorism in human history, the US was uneasily discovering that it was creating more terrorists. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had sketched the nature of this puzzle in an October, 2003 memo with acid clarity. He asked: “Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?”3”? Though 37 He asked: Donald Rumsfeld, memo, 16 October 2003, available at globalsecurity.org. 36 HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_018268