In the year 2000, war took the lives of 168,000 Africans, 65,000 Asians, 39,000 "middle-easterners," 37,000 Europeans, and 2,000 Central and South Americans. At the same time, American arms manufacturers were making it possible for war to be the "booming business" that it is. Forty of the top one hundred arms-producing companies in the world are American companies with profits totaling $664 billion dollars in 1999. Over $93 billion of that profit comes from the manufacture and sale of weapons, more than the profit of the other 60 companies combined (US$64 billion). Is this not something Americans should know about? Meanwhile, those in the less technologically developed world who are not dying in warfare are likely to be dying of disease or starvation. While the life expectancy of the average American was about 75 years in 2001, it was 65 for the Indonesian, 64 for the Russian, 45 for the Afghan, 39 for the Zambian, and 38 for the Rwandan and the Mozambiquan. While an American baby has 99.4% of survival after birth, the infant mortality rate is 2% for the Russian, 10% for the Ethiopian, almost 15% for the Afghan, and nearly 20% for the Angolan. And while much of the "third world" believes that we care little for their welfare, many more question our motivations even less kindly. They believe we are more interested in exploiting their natural resources for our benefit, and exploiting their people for their cheap labor.

Professor Thomas P.M. Barnett is a Senior Strategic Researcher in the Warfare Analysis & Research Department, Center for Naval Warfare Studies, U.S. Naval War College. Currently, Thomas is on temporary assignment as the Assistant for Strategic Futures, Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Office of the Secretary of Defense, where he is working with OFT Director Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski (USN, ret.) on a cluster of strategic concepts that link change in the international security environment to the imperative of transforming U.S. military capabilities to meet future threats. Thomas has published a number of articles explaining these strategic concepts, which he presents comprehensively in a briefing entitled, "A Future Worth Creating: Defense Transformation in the New Security Environment." At the Naval War College, he serves as Director of the NewRuleSets.Project, an ambitious effort to draw new "maps" of power and influence in the world economy so as to expand the U.S. Military's--and specifically, the U.S. Navy's--vision of where and how it can wield maximum influence across the international security environment of the Era of Globalization. Thomas has written for Esquire, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Providence Journal, and published a book with Praeger entitled Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker (1992) In December 2002, he was selected by the editorial staff of Esquire as the "The Strategist" for their special edition entitled, "The Best and Brightest," which introduced a few dozen people "who are changing our world." Thomas has a BA (Honors) from the University of Wisconsin. Following Wisconsin, he earned an AM in Regional Studies: Russia, Eastern Europe and Central Asia and a PhD in Political Science from Harvard University. This presentation is one of many from the IT Conversations archives of Pop!Tech 2004 held in Camden, Maine, October 21-23, 2004