our age, small-sized problems were spilling rapidly into crises of strategy. One hot battlefield instant - an explosion under an armorless truck, say - could freeze the operations of a billion-dollar division. Nearly everyone begins to ask, sometimes out loud: Why did that happen? Followed pretty quickly by: What the hell are we doing here? The little bombs were shaking more than the Humvees. Walking into the Pentagon, one is struck by cascading sensations of immensity and volume and, frankly, gravity. Surely, you reflect, there must be someone here with a plan for everything? But there was not; there is not now. Yet the massiveness, the ineffable historical density and weight of American power, is so breathtaking that its frequent impotence in the face of a changing world represents a particular and unforgettable and, well, searing shock. The soldiers who had experienced those cold, failing nights at the edge of superpower rippled with unease. This was the slim comfort of life inside big, old and lamed structures confronting the fast, blithe and unstoppable future. By 2009, with the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq settling into a low boil, America’s generals again began wondering what other cracks were spreading around the world. The Unknown and the Future seemed to have an uneasy parallel meaning. The diplomats worried about this too, of course, but with soldiers dying every day, the questions had a particular urgency for the military. The top of the command chain asked incessantly about what they might be missing. What fissures were running even through their own building, masked by its scale but waiting quietly to make their best plans look foolish and dangerous? And: How they could possibly confront this world with 30% less of what they had a decade ago? They made a few phone calls. | received one of them. Ze It was hard not to notice, if you picked up one of those incoming queries from Washington and were asked to draft your views on how this uncertain world mig