Thomas Barnett passes along word of a week old announcement that I’d missed about the closing of the Office of Force Transformation. I was an admirer of the late Admiral Art Cebrowski, the OFT’s founding and only director, but Barnett is right in his assessment of the move:
[The Long War is simply taking over. OFT’s decline simply represents the end of the pre-9/11 focus on transformation, which, absent 9/11, was a much needed bureaucratic push.
Art and others played out a most excellent string following 9/11, using OFT as a pulpit to push Network-Centric Warfare’s “many and the cheap” mantra in ways most helpful to waging the Long War. But Art’s success in mainstreaming his thinking meant that OFT always had a limited shelf life.
At some point in any successful project’s development, it goes from being “the Next Big Thing” to the status quo and, eventually, it becomes history.
