Planting "lily pads" in the "gap".

In his influential tome The Pentagon's New Map, Defense Department Futurist Thomas P.M. Barnett divides the globe between the "Functioning Core"--nations plugged into the emerging "global governance" network--and the "Non-integrating Gap"--nations yet to be absorbed into that network. The future mission of the military, Barnett insists, will be to expand the "core" by assimilating presently non-integrated nations into that global architecture. To carry out that strategy, the U.S. military is presently implementing what the Los Angeles Times calls "the greatest shake-up in America's overseas military deployment since the end of World War II."

"The days of the massive 'small-town U.S.A.' bases in Germany, Japan and South Korea are over," continues the Times. "Replacing them will be a global network of what Pentagon planners have dubbed 'lily pads'--small, no-frills bases in remote and dangerous corners of the world that can act as jumping-off points when crises arise." One of the first of those "lily pads" is an American outpost at the Manas air base, an abandoned Red Army facility in the former Soviet Central Asian republic Kyrgystan. The strategy behind such deployments "is to position U.S. forces throughout an 'arc of instability' that runs through the Caribbean, North Africa, the Caucasus, Central Asia, the Middle East and South Asia."

U.S. Air Force Captain Dale Linafelter was "dumbfounded" when he learned he would be deployed to a former Soviet base in Kyrgystan. "I'd never even heard of Kyrgystan," he told the Times. Of his colleagues, Captain Linafelter notes: "Some of them still don't know where they are.... You know, there's an old saying: War is God's way of teaching geography to Americans."

Countless bloody geography lessons will ensue as our government--contemptuously ignoring George Washington's admonition against permanent foreign entanglements--scatters U.S. personnel as tripwires around the globe.