tdaxp

Volokh, E. (2007). The marines, the coast guard, and the constitution. The Volokh Conspiracy. January 28, 2007. Available online: http://volokh.com/posts/1170035957.shtml.

Eugene Volokh ponders the question: is United States Marine Corp is constitutional, as it appears to be an Army administred under the Constitutionally more generous terms given to the Navy?

The tougher conceptual question is whether the Marines can constitutionally be considered part of the constitutionally specified Navy (whether or not they are part of a federal agency labeled the Navy), or must be seen as falling under the constitutional head of "Armies." In either event they'd be constitutional, but if they are treated under the head of "Armies," then they'd have to be funded using appropriations that are for no longer than two years; if they are treated under the head of "Navy," they can be funded under unlimited-length appropriations. Recall that the relevant Congressional powers are:

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy.

I don't know the answer, but I thought I'd flag the question (recognizing that it is of little practical importance, especially these days).

Dr. Volokh then gives speculated on why the Army should be on a shorter lease than the Navy:

My (somewhat vague) recollection is that the constitutional distinction between armies and the navy stems from the fact that Englishmen of the time -- including the American variety -- saw land-based forces as much more dangerous to domestic liberty than sea-based forces, and sea-based forces as much more important to day-to-day national defense. That's also why there was lots of concern about a standing army, but not about a standing navy. Modern Marines are in this respect at least potentially more like "armies" than like the "navy"; that's why the question I pose is theoretically nontrivial.

Is Barnett's Leviathan an updated version of the Department of the Navy (the few, high-tech, can only be deployed offshore and abroad) while his SysAdmin just an updated version of the Department of the Army (the many, the low tech, deployable at home and abroad). If an Office of Systems Administration is created, would it have to be funded for no more than two years at a time?

Earlier, after terrorists exported trouble from Pakistan to India, I urged readers to view the event through PNM Theory and particularly the PNM/tdaxp synthesis that sees the world divided into several zones

1. The Old Core (North America, Western Europe, Japan)
2. The New Core (Brazil, India, China, etc)
3. The Seam (Cuba, South Africa, Philippines, etc.)
4. The Non-Integrating Gap (Congo, Saudi Arabia, Malaysia, etc)

The higher your country up in this list, the nicer your citizens' lives are, the less likely they are to die of starvation, the less likely your women are likely to be raped as a tool of warfare, the less likely your child will die of starvation. All in all, it's fantastic to be born in the Old Core, pretty good to be born in the New Core, somewhat acceptable to be born in the Seam, and a Hobbesian nightmare in the Gap.

Part of the Terror of the Gap is that it exports terrorism, death, and disease from the Gap to the Seam and the Core. Lebanon's Civil War's envelopment of Israel is yet another example of this example. We are not seeing in Lebanon "collective punishment" or a "lethal care wreck." We are seeing something that has always existed in the world: the attempted destruction of the good by the bad. Lebanon's export of violence and death to Israel is analogous to Afghanistan's export of violence and death to America, or any of the other recent acts of terrorism against civilized countries.

Fortunately, the success of global capitalism teaches us how this will end: the spread of the Core to the four corners of the world, and the eradication of war as we know it. Between now and that end of history good decisions can be made, and the nature of that final peace can be tweaked this way and that. Much work is to be done, and billions of lives hang in the balance.

Yet when we see specific cases like the current Lebanon-Israel conflict, we know what's going on: the Gap is exporting violence to the Core. If you want a true end to this mess, don't worry about shuttle diplomacy and magic bullets. Instead: Shrink the Gap, primarily through structural economic and security connectivity.

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Thomas P.M. Barnett defines the "non-integrating gap" as those "regions of the world that are largely disconnected from the global economy and the rule set that defines its stability" (T. Barnett 2004:xvii-xviii). Immediately he gives it a geographic description, "today, the non-integrating gap is made up of the Caribbean Rim, Andean South America, virtually all of Africa, portions of the Balkans the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East, and most of Southeast Asia." Barnett writes that the "Gap" will be "the expeditionary theater for the U.S. military in the 21st century" (T Barnett 2003) of "failed states and feral cities" (T. Barnett 2004:151). The rest of the world, the “Functioning Core,” is in turn split “into the Old Core, anchored by America, Europe, and Japan; and the New Core, whose leading pillars are China, India, Brazil and Russia” (T. Barnett 2005:32).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Political Geography (geographie politique) was defined in 1751 (Kristof 1985:1178), but it's modern study was invented by Friedrich Ratzel in his description of political geography (politische Geographie) in 1897 in terms of space and position (Kiss 1942:634). Rudolf Kjellen invented the term “geopolitics” (Agnew 1995:1; Tuathail 1994:259) shortly thereafter. Kjellen was primarily interested in how geography effects the power relations of states (Osterud 1998:191) – specifically, their land and people (Tunander 2005:548).

Note: This is a selection from Redefining the Gap, part of tdaxp's SummerBlog '06

Geopolitics helped make geography a science by focusing on the political (Unstead 1949:47) and human (Dawson 1987:28) dimensions of geography. Halford Mackinder, an influential geopolitician, described his goal as not "to predict a great future for this or that country, but to make a geographical formula into which you could fit any political balance." (Hall 1955:109). Thus, geography is a "conditioning factor" in many parts of politics (Spkyman 1938:29). The internal (Williams 1927:142) and external (Enterline 1998:804) nature of states and how they go to war (Midlarsky 1995:224) are effected by their geopolitical position. Geopolitical analysis has survived changing constellations of great powers and technologies (Hooson 1962:20). Stable geopolitical concepts have emerged, even as academic debates on the specifics of geopolitics continue (Harkavy 2001:38).

"Glossary," by Thomas Barnett, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/pnm/glossary.htm.

"Updated Glossary of Key Terms from the Pentagon's New Map," by Thomas Barnett, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/bfa/glossary.htm.

"Neoliberal Geopolitics," by Susan Roberts, Anna Secor, and Matthew Sparke, Antipode, 35:5, 2003, ppg 886-897, http://faculty.washington.edu/sparke/neoliberalgeopolitics.pdf.

"Denaturalizing Dispossession: Critical Ethnography in the Age of Resurgant Imperialism," by Gillian Hart, Creative Destruction: Area Knowledge & the new Geographies of Empire, 15 April 2004, http://geography.berkeley.edu/PeopleHistory/faculty/GHart_CreativeDestruction.pdf

Continuing my work from "Operationalizing the Gap" (which itself built off of "The Cores of Europe"), I now look at what the academic press is saying about Tom Barnett's Pengatgon's New Map Theory.

The results aren't kind.

"Force Structure Will Change," by Thomas Barnett and Henry Gaffney, Proceedings, October 2000, pp 30-34, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/published/forcestruc.htm

"A Hammer Looking for Nails: The Gap, the Core, and the Final Frontier," interview with Thomas Barnett, Raeson, 1 November 2004, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/interviews/RaesonInterview.pdf.

"Viral in-coring: Seoul to Beijing," by Thomas Barnett, Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog, 4 January 2006, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/weblog/archives2/002774.html.

"http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/glossary.htm," Thomas P.M. Barnett, downloaded 8 April 2006, http://www.thomaspmbarnett.com/glossary.htm.

In this post I will try to put together an operationalization and some alternate rival hypotheses for Tom Barnett's PNM Theory.



I need to finish a research design for my Scopes & Methods class. The rough draft was on traditional geopolitics, but needed considerably work. I kicked around ways to to save it, yet I had trouble focusing on writing that just doesn't matter. I learn so much more from blog writing than class writing that I find myself looking forward to typing in new posts, but assignments are drudgery.

Until the obvious hit me: write it as a blog post! It's not a good blog post -- it's actually the perfect combination that doesn't work either as a tdaxp post or as something I could hand in -- but at least it gets me motivated. So today's work discusses the Research Question, Independent Variable, Dependent Variables, and Alternate Research Hypotheses required to operationalize the Gap.

I would also like to acknowledge the work of Catholicgauze, Chicago Boys, Coming Anarchy [1, 2, 3] and The Glittering Eye in "mapping the gap." Those posts were inspirational.