The Leviathan/SysAdmin split -- revisited

Part of the never-ending GOP/Dem fight in the "portal" separating our two Americas

Discussing current US military evolutions with a colleague on the phone yesterday and I bumped into this weird quasi-realization/hallucination and, I thought, how artificially intelligent of me! Pattern recognition along with some self-important filling-in-the-gaps rationalizations!

Call me Tomplexity!

Going back to The Pentagon’s New Map:

Basic ideas:

• World divided into two parts:

  • Functioning Core of more advanced/advancing economies hooking up (pun intended) comprehensively to globalizaiton

  • Non-integrating Gap of less connected states whose combined regions account for virtually all US military interventions in post-Cold War era — along with virtually all the wars and mass violence and terror

• US Military increasingly pulled in two directions by this post-Cold War “demand signal” from Rest of World:

  • Leviathan Big-War force — more Air Force and Navy — still wants to focus on China (remind of you anything?)

  • System Administrator Force — more Spec Ops, Army, Marines — constantly sucked into Military Operations Other Than War (the dreaded MOOTWA).

As I saw it, the Leviathan was super-high-tech and needing fewer and fewer troops to deploy, while the SysAmin got stuck with all the small jobs where bodies are necessarily required en masse (security stuff, disaster response, crisis management).

So, what do I see today?

I see the Military Singularity moving along swiftly, increasingly removing the soldier from the battlefield equation and replacing them with drones/robots/AI. I see a new fighter/attack next-gen aircraft in the works (F47) that is designed to be the “drone quarterback.”

With DOGE and Trump 2.0 looking for cuts, manpower (aka, “end strength”) is an obvious target. We are going to have a smaller force and already face that long-term pressure: tougher to recruit, smaller demographic pools to recruit from.

Meanwhile, what is our military getting stuck doing?

We supply Ukraine. We torch the Houthis now and then. We backstop Israel. We plan our “drone hellscape” for Taiwan/China. We deploy to the US southern border. Our naval ships cruise the “Gulf of America.” We now obsess over access to the Arctic (Canada, Greenland).

And then there’s DOGE: No more USAID, FEMA slated for deconstruction, DHS taking on more obligations with all these deportations, and lotsa loose talk about the military backfilling on these personnel requirements.

So, what do I see in whole?

I see the Leviathan/SysAdmin split re-unfolding between a super-high-tech, low-manpower-intensive Big War force where we DON’T play well with others (including allies, for the most part, because we’re in the scaring/deterring/punishing business) and a more manpower-intensive crisis response force increasingly pulled into hemispheric/border/domestic stuff, alongside an increasing USG reliance on private-sector security players (the return of the Dark [Eric] Prince, with whom I have not crossed paths for many a year).

I always said the SysAdmin force would be more civilian than uniform, more USG than just DoD, more private-sector than public-sector, and I still see all those inevitabilities unfolding — right down to the use of private/outsourced prisons both here and abroad in cooperating nations like El Salvador.

Nice watch!

I’ve also long argued that it’s been China and not the US that came far closer to realizing my SysAdmin Force/function in its Belt and Road Initiative — designed specifically to connect less-connected regions to the global economy (or, more specifically, to a China-dominated-and-defined version of the global economy).

But, per my Friday last post:

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Which I originally presented in a critical fashion with regard to trade (and I’m still of that mind, for the most part), I now must admit that I find myself seeing in Trump 2.0 an odd sort of inadvertently backing into my Leviathan-SysAdmin model.

Would the administration care for that analysis?

So long as it was all cast in “secure the border” mode, yes.

Again, what are we seeing?

Back in the day, I foresaw FEMA and USAID being folded into an ever-expanding DHS (ultimately becoming my Department of Everything Else) that needed to leverage all sorts of private-sector players in an out-sourced manner. I saw a merging of domestic security, border security, and our foreign “connectivity-building” activities that come to define our foreign policy (State).

So, yeah, if you admit to China coming closest with the BRI and then spot the US increasingly mirror-imaging in response, then it starts to look more and more like what DOGE and Trump 2.0 are actually moving towards — whether they care to admit it or not — the primary difference being (and we’ve seen this in the evolution of my books):

• The Leviathan is becoming the East-West legacy big-war force, while

• The congealing SysAdmin function is becoming the “everything else,” North-South security force, with the expanding Department of Everything Else looking more and more like an empowered DHS that routinely “borrows” military troops from the states’ National Guards and the US military proper (something I argued back in The Pentagon’s New Map to the horror of the Pentagon itself).

Again, I find myself in the slightly awkward/surprising position of seeing ideas that I’ve long sold coming into clearer focus in a Republican administration than in a Democratic one — this time with ANM’s argument of North-South dynamics increasingly superseding East-West ones in practical terms (see Trump trying to load-shed Leviathan exposure around the Eastern Hemisphere [less connected with NATO, settle Ukraine, let Israel lead with KSA in Gulf vis-a-vis Iran beatdown-in-the-making, make nice with nuclear NorKo, maybe sell-out Taiwan for the right trade/currency deal with Beijing?] while voicing all sorts of integrationist ambitions in the Western Hemisphere).

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From East-West to North-South …

And, yeah, that gets me wondering about whether or not a Big Bang/demolition strategy — such as evinced to-date by Trump 2.0 and DOGE and the Tech Bros and turbocharged with border/immigration/Arctic issues — was always the most likely realization path, as in, be careful what you wish for.

But, in that only-Nixon-can-go-to-China way, maybe this was always the way it had to be — to include the demolition of the USG as we have long known it in its Cold War forms (like the creation of USAID in 1961).

Maybe that’s the only way a system like ours can change, sad — but with a brutal realism — to say.

Now for another tortuous Star Trek analogy …