If I am ever invited into someone’s personal study, office, or library—especially someone who puts themselves forward as a national security type—one of the things I not-so-subtly look for is maps, charts, or better yet, a globe.
Yes, I will judge you. It matters.
I have seen exceptionally credentialed and powerful uniformed and civilian leadership here and in Europe have an almost comical ignorance of the world in which they hold access to levers of almost unimaginable power. From a complete disinterest bordering on criminal unawareness of the bottom topography of the Baltic and Taiwan Strait, to not knowing where the Cape of Good Hope is, or even what a Great Circle Route is.
That kind of ignorance gets people killed.
They got their positions of power and influence for a whole host of reasons, but an understanding of geography and the ability to read a map was probably not one of them.
This all goes back to not just an incomplete education—but an incuriosity of the fundamentals that makes me question completely anything these individuals have to say on any subject outside of the Coke v. Pepsi rivalry.
Our regulars are probably tired of seeing me write, “Let’s go to the chartroom…”. It is more than a tagline. I mean it. You have to ground everything you do relative to the stage on which it is being presented. In the national security arena for a global power—it is the planet.
But what representation are you using? What projection of that three dimensional object is informing your decisions?
If someone says, “When you look at a map of the world…”, more likely than not, what will pop into your mind will be what is at the top of the post, the Mercator Projection.
That may be one of the contributing factors to inadequate strategic thinking in the modern age.
Of course, any attempt to represent a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional format is going to create some problems.
You need multiple perspectives, and often the one that best serves in helping you understand the challenge of the moment.
As we continue to argue the point here, we don’t need a new force design, or national strategy, we need a national understanding.
We need to understand the fact we are a maritime and aerospace power, and those are the two domains where the majority of fighting in any war against the People’s Republic of China is going to take place.
It has a unique set of challenges that have nothing to do with politics, people, culture or anything from man; it has to do with the interface of land, water, time, and distance.
As we learned and then forgot from WWII, any war in the far reaches of the Pacific requires range, scale, and the logistics system that appreciates both and can sustain the fight forward.
Stop throwing spreadsheets and hundred-page think tank products at a leadership class that are more verbal and personable personality types than they are numbers and engineering thinkers. On top of that, they are busy. You need to catch their attention at the start and keep it long enough to give them the highlights of the Executive Summary.
They like pictures…but you need the right pictures to make your point.
I give you the Spilhaus Projection:
In 1942 (Athelstan Frederick) Spilhaus tackled the problem of displaying the world's oceans in an unbroken view. He achieved this by carefully selecting antipodal points as the centers for two hemispheric projections.[12] However it wasn't until 1979 that he published maps using continental shorelines as "natural boundaries", including one that has become the typical example of Spilhaus's technique. It uses locations near Hankou in China and Córdoba in Argentina as poles with a cut joining them across the Bering Strait.[13] In 1991, Spilhaus published Atlas of the World illustrated with a large selection of maps having "geophysical boundaries", typically coastlines, in various orientations and for various purposes. He published several other papers and articles on the topic.[14] More recently, the Spilhaus Projection has been used to map multiple seafloor characteristics such as tectonic plate boundaries, hydrothermal vents, and drilling hole sites.[15]
You can get a more full background here, but let’s discuss why this should be the map we should be pondering the most now.
What are the top-5 even the novice should get?
AUKUS is a must-succeed. Don’t balk. Don’t stutter. Don’t be difficult. Make it work. It reinforces our left flank. Australia and the Philippines are our shield and redoubt.
Taiwan is the stopper that keeps the PRC relatively contained. If you lose that, Guam is your new front line.
A strong Japan and South Korea must be made stronger and closer. They are our right flank.
What does the PRC want? Once you accept that they want everything from the line drawn from Alaska to New Zealand to their coast under their uncontested control, but are more than happy to let us have everything on the other side, then you understand what they have been doing for decades in the small island nations in the Southwest Pacific.
People grow up with maps that emphasize Europe and the North Atlantic. This projection breaks that mental fixation, putting Europe and the North Atlantic in a minor corner of the map, almost an afterthought that barely catches the eye.
A slightly more recognizable version is below.
Do you know that if you turn this into square tiles, they can all fit together in a repeating pattern? You can cover floors with it.
It looks like this.
When does the Secretary of War’s bathroom need to be retiled?
Another excellent write up. To your point regarding physical globes: there is something irreplicable about tactile feel and a physical object - it is also why books are still king in my opinion. Yes you can read a PDF or ebook, but there is something that helps our brain (and memory) connect with a physical book. On the Spilhaus projection map: this should be required in all strategic planning war rooms - I agree with your top 5 points/recommendations, the strategic picture has shifted at least a decade ago, and military planners need to understand this.
Thinking about maps, I wonder how space force sees our planet? Are 2-D projections even helpful?