One of my mentors dropped this quote on me a few years back: “The United States military is obsessed with tactical solutions to strategic problems.” After I picked my jaw off the floor because it was such an apt description of the last 20 years, I began to chew on the meaning of what they’d said. Because, yes, for two or more decades, the U.S. has conducted a largely tactically-focused series of conflicts. And why not? At the tactical level, we’re very successful. There were few firefights across the length of the global war on terror we didn’t win. However, we could rarely tie tactical success to strategic victory; i.e., providing total security to Iraq and Afghanistan and instilling trust in their governments. Probably because shooting people and breaking things does not equal governance, and something about Jeffersonian democracy not being transplantable. As I’ve been pondering all this, it struck me that the dichotomy between strategic versus tactical problem solving can be seen at work in the 2023 classic, Barbie.
Yes, you heard me. Barbie.
A Nation-State in Trouble
In Greta Gerwig’s masterpiece, we are introduced to the nation-state of Barbieland. Barbieland is a constitutional republic, with three branches of government, a robust and thriving economy, free press, and entirely without conflict. The CIA World Factbook remains very silent on Barbieland’s demographics, but from what we can tell, it does not have a standing army, navy, air force, or even a militia system. At face value, Barbieland is a utopia that any of the mid-19th century American utopianists (sure, it can be a word, why not?) would be proud of.
However, there is something rotten in the state of Barbie. Land ownership, positions of governance, and even suffrage are only held by the tribe known as the Barbies. The other major player in the region, the Kens, have no political power but also do not seem to suffer persecution for it. They are free to pursue lives of ease trying to impress the Barbies, which seems to be their main occupation. As far as U.S. intelligence can gather, it would seem to be their raison d’être. While on the surface this division of power seems to work, it is clear that the introduction of any radically new ideas might destabilize this idyllic society. Lacking diversity of thought, Barbieland is rife for revolution.
This moment comes when Barbie and Ken travel to the Real World, a dystopian nightmare, where Ken becomes introduced to the ideology of radical masculinity. Not having experience with any ideas at all, and nursing a slight grudge against the Barbies for not paying enough attention to his amphibious operations, Ken falls to indoctrination immediately and rushes back to Barbieland to spread his new political dogma. Much like Lenin’s train arriving in Russia courtesy of the Germans in 1917, Ken’s arrival in Barbieland sets off a total political and social revolution.
The Coup
The Patriarchal Revolution is swift and complete, undercutting the Barbies’ will to resist through political programming via the arts, gender norms, and equine maneuvers. The Kens establish a patriarchal society based on the Mojo Dojo Case House Compact and prepare to legitimize their coup through an amendment to the Barbieland constitution which would disenfranchise the Barbies in favor of the Kens. They declare their new government Ken-Land. They’re not very inventive in their terminology.
At the same time, the Kens begin the construction of Ken-Land, nee Barbieland’s first defensive barrier: a wall on the border with the Real World. However, the Kens lack basic engineering capability and what might have posed a formidable obstacle to control the movement of ideas and peoples around Ken-Land only results in a pile of stones. This oversight results in the introduction of even more ideas, and peoples, into the safe harbor for toxic masculinity.
In addition to failing to secure their lines of supply and advance, the Kens overlook several key population demographics that might resist Ken-Land. Namely, Weird Barbie and Allen. Failing to conduct a proper intelligence preparation of the battlefield, or even just a simple ASCOPE (Areas, Structures, Capabilities, Organizations, People, and Events) assessment results in safe havens available to any insurgent Barbies. However, in the immediate aftermath of the Patriarchal Revolution, any type of resistance does not appear to exist. This would seem to be why the Kens could not see past their initial victory and neglected to consolidate their gains in any meaningful way. This in flagrant violation of Field Manual 3-0. You hate to see it.
Politics by Other Means
Barbie’s return with a mobile training team (MTT) from the Real World results in the first insurgency against the Kens. Barbie and the MTT make contact with Weird Barbie and Allen, forming a complex network of divergent interests for one single purpose. Their strategic ends are simple: return to the status quo, but with a more heterogeneous society to preserve the security of the nation-state. To do this, the insurgency would rely on chaining tactical victories into an operational framework aimed at their strategic end.
Rather than strike at the visible means of power – Mojo Dojo Casa Houses, guitars, and horses, for example – the insurgency targets the Kens’ center of gravity: their need for the Barbies to approve of them. As the other Barbies gradually go through political and social reprogramming to peel them away from their loyalty to the state, the Barbies use them to sow widespread doubt and fear in the society of the Kens. This has the result of destabilizing the peace of Ken-Land, resulting in the formation of the first two armed forces in (probably) the history of either Barbieland or Ken-Land. Robust militarization and mobilization of manpower taxes the meager resources of Ken-Land and distracts their attention from the nascent insurgency under their very noses.
However, rather than attacking the insurgency, the Kens turn on each other, igniting a vicious civil war. Failing to understand the dynamics of Ken-Land/Barbieland’s Political, Military, Economic, Social, Information, Infrastructure, Physical environment, and Time, the Kens end up marshalling all their forces against each other. This was precisely the goal of the Barbies and the end result of a series of tactical victories which created the operational space for this conflict. With the Kens entirely bogged down in a war of attrition, the Barbies are able to retake the government and restore the nation’s original constitution. This results in the Barbies’ return to power and the downfall of Ken-Land.
Analysis
Okay, yes, this is all utterly ridiculous. But is it? The Barbies are able to overturn an entire regime because they properly understand the levels of war – and also because they understand that strategic victory does not come about just because of fighting. Their insurgency, which is just begging to be studied by some COIN nerd out there (PLEASE, study it, and then publish it here), achieves its objectives with relative completeness.
The Kens, on the other hand, find waging a counterinsurgency to be beyond their ken (SORRY, I couldn’t help it, it was just sitting right there). They cannot see beyond the immediate tactical level and so they identify the threat as each other. Divided, they are helpless to stop the political change sweeping the country. With their focus purely on the social change in their society, they fail to take into account the political, economic, and information war that the Barbies bring against them. Indeed, their social changes were not even hard-wired into their new society since once they found out that the patriarchy wasn’t just about horses, they lost significant ideological fervor. The Patriarchal Revolution needed heavier underpinnings than that to be able to succeed.
What we can learn from the Barbies is that success comes from building cohesive coalitions with a clear, unified strategic endstate gained by achievable operational goals brought about by tactical victories aimed at the enemy’s center of gravity. By nesting their objectives and pairing them with an appropriate whole-of-Barbieland approach, they were able to overturn Ken-Land. In the end, the Kens radical fervor was not Kenough to stop the Barbies’ operational framework.
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Views expressed in this piece are the author’s own and do not reflect those of the U.S. Army or Department of Defense.
Cover image courtesy Warner Brothers Studios
The Angry Staff Officer 
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