Watched it (and added it to the TerrorWiki) earlier this evening — I must say, either the guy's gotten better at articulating his ideas (maybe the act of actually giving the briefing focuses him, like you suggested) or I never gave him enough credit earlier; I was pretty impressed by some of the points he put forward there. I don't remember the Leviathan-SysAdmin component being a part of his first Esquire article (which I read once upon a time, over a year ago now, for a security studies course with Bacevich), which might be why I wasn't particulary impressed with it at the time — as I remember it seemed mostly just an exercise in taxonomy. In any case, his idea for a "SystemAdmin" force is kind of what I was imagining here with the idea of an independent Civil Affairs Command and integrating nation-building functions within the US govt, I think — though I hadn't thought about internationalizing it and working it into his broader "Integrate the Gap" strategy for the Core nations. I thought his point (in the Q&A session, which I've watched the first half hour or so of) about State as a "Department of Peace" that works with stable functioning Core countries, the Leviathan as an instrument for dealing with hostile Gap nations, and the SysAdmin as a department dedicated to bridging the gap (no pun intended) between those two missions was a particularly good formulation of the "not our problem" problem. But when he got the part about dividing up assets from existing departments and services... well, I can only imagine the bureaucratic carnage. It took almost forty years for the National Security Act of 1947 to achieve its goal of unifying the services, and Barnett is proposing a *major* reorganization of America's security and foreign policy establishment, some of which Nadezhda talks about below. If we're going to build a SysAdmin force, we will need leaders pushing and pulling for it throughout, and I think the development of an independent CACOM might be a first institutional step to develop some of those interests within the military. Task them with a mission, give them the opportunity for advancement, and establish a platform for them within the DoD, and I think you could see a real effort to build up at least the nucleus of a potential SysAdmin force, just as you've seen Special Ops' expansion under the Global War on Terror. Unforunately, I'm not certain whether Iraq is a big enough problem to generate the kind of momentum for change that that kind of reorientation would require, and I'm really not sure that anyone within the current administration really recognizes the problem that Barnett depicts.