See if you can find someone who can lend you a copy. You need to skim the book for the background assumptions and the history of the post-Vietnam military for the initial problem he was addressing. It remains oneof the underlying drivers of his agenda. The book is also a basic primer in about two years of courses in IR, US foreign policy, international econ, etc. Remember, he's actually a Harvard phD in all of this stuff -- he was ready to be a Kremlinologist when the Berlin Wall fell (bummer for one's career), so it's not like he doesn't have the intellectual background for all of this. He's thoroughly familiar and capable of engaging in the academic debates. Since you've been taking courses yourself in all of this, you'll appreciate the antecedents and the academic conversations the are underlying his discussion, even though he's adopted different terms for sythesizing the academic discourse. Barnett is trying to do a pretty awesome thing -- stimulate the development of a new "metanarrative" for the US and the world, since our old one is clearly out-of-date, stale, inadequate and misleading. If your old way of talking and thinking, your shared mental picutures, are producing a discourse that's identifying the wrong (old) issues and asking wrong (old) questions, your not likely to get to answers that are very helpful. In fact, you're likely to get to the wrong answers. He's trying to take the best of the thinking and debates going on in academe and the real world of the military and international business, integrate and synthesize them, and produce a new way of talking about this stuff. Now since I think we desparately need a new metanarrative, and the one he's proposing is a lot closer to what I believe would be healthy than, e.g. "democracy and freedom" or "free markets" or "unilateral vs multilateral" or "globalization" or "hegemon" or "empire" I'm willing to get engaged in his effort of changing how we think about and talk about htis stuff. His attempt is both remarkably ambitious and quite admirable. If we're going to have meaningful discussions, they're going to have to cut across not just academic disciplines but areas of the real world that have their own world views and vocabularies. They have to be ways of capturing ideas that can be meaningful for the military types (lots of whom have phDs as well, people don't realize, but not necessarily in political economy or IR). They also have to be meaningful for the int'l business types, the politicians from both parties, the punditry, etc. Barnett's thinking is a lot more evolved and sophisticated than what's in the book. The iterations he goes through with the constant feedback he gets, and the constant revisions to the brief, are one of his true saving graces. The man has a major streak of intellectual honesty despite the otherwise irritating self-promotion. Now his vocabulary (like all narratives) has lots of issues when you drill down on each one of them. And I don't necesarily accept either all of his analyses or the priorities he chooses to focus on. E.g. I think he ignores at his peril the global financial markets as a key piece of globallization (e.g. Summers' "balance of terror" between our trade deficit with China and their financing it through buying our debt). Theses issue areas are there as part of his schema, but their implications and the risks to his "better future" are underdeveloped or underestimated. He also doesn't develop adequately the various not-so-happy scenarios of the New Core transitioning into an integrated part of a big Core. For a Russia specialist he doesn't pay enough attention to the transitioning problems of Russia, China & India to my way of thinking. But they are on his map in a helpful way of thinking that says, hey it's a good thing for China and Russia and India to become important players on the world stage with a major stake in a well-integrated open economic and political world. One of his most important contributions is to undermine the China-phobia that a lot in the US mlitary have evinced over the decades and that is shared on both the further reaches of both left and right in US politics. The book's just a skim so you can follow the current conversation he's got going and so you can appreciate his new pieces better. But it's not essential, since his whole approach is to keep building on and bringing forward the foundation ideas as more pieces get elaborated. So in his presentations -- eg the Cspan brief - he tries to help people jump into the conversation at any point, not have to go back and read everything that preceded that point. On the "put somebody in charge" versus "multi-agency coordination and/or military-jointness" -- this is an example of the core organizational choice in any complex multi-product multi-national organization. It's part of why large corporations periodically make radical shifts in their organizational structure. There's no one right way of reconciling the tensions, and sometimes you have to privilege onedimension over others because of the external environment you face. Even the companies who adopt matrix management -- which tries to reconcile structurally several axes on which an organization can be structured and operate -- will periodically make major adjustments to the matrix. Needless to say, it's much harder to shift organizing principles in the US government (see DHS, intelligence community) than in a MNC. But as the external environment changes adjustments must be made. In the foreign and national security realm, we're mostly still operating on postWWII organizing principles as adapted for Cold War, so it's probably time to blow up our organizational structures and realign them on some new principles. The dilemma in the civil affairs-military-diplomatic arena is paralleled in the foreign assistance area. The "center of gravity" of USAID has been shifted repeatedly (and probably too frequently) over the years. If you put the emphasis in the field, the risk is the field guys go native. If you put the emphasis in the center, the risk is your decisions and your implementation are too removed from the reality of facts on the ground. Again -- same problem for multinationals like IBM. I've found in organizational changes, the most important thing is to figure out what the right questions are that you're going to want your organization to address over time. Not worry about getting the right answer once and for all. No right answers, we just have to better understand the tradeoffs.