The 21st Century Security Environment and the Future of War

TLDR: In this paper, the authors argue that the future cannot be predicted in any useful detail, at least not in a very useful sense, and the challenge is to cope with uncertainty, not try to diminish it.

Abstract: Some commentators and observers of international affairs--including the author--claim to have a unified theory of strategy, a unified theory of war, and a cunningly connected meta-narrative for the twenty-first century, indeed for all of history. They exult in being reductionists (in the good sense of the term), to be able to say with confidence, "Strategy is really all about ...." This point of view endorses the Thucydidean triptych which holds that the primary motives behind diplomatic and belligerent behaviors are "fear, honor, and interest." (1) That triad of genius is worth a library of modern scholarship and social scientific rigor on the causes of war. But beware of the pretentiously huge idea that purports to explain what everybody else, supposedly, has been too dumb to grasp. Ask yourselves, for example, is Philip Bobbitt's 2008 book, Terror and Consent, the tour de force that reveals all about twenty-first century conflict, or is it wanting at its core, albeit protected by a great deal of insight and decoration? (2) Or, to tread on riskier ground, when General Sir Rupert Smith writes about "war amongst the people" as comprising the conceptual key to twenty-first century warfare, is this a critically important insight, or is it a case of conceptual overreach? (3) New-sounding terms and phrases, advanced by highly persuasive people with apparently solid credentials, can usually find a ready audience. To expand on this point, officials and senior military officers are, by profession, problem solvers. They are always inclined to be credulous when presented with apparent novelty, especially when the presentation is done in a welcoming and digestible style. Officials do not want to be told that their world is complex and difficult. They already know that. Like hope, complexity and difficulty are neither policy nor strategy. The future cannot be predicted in any useful detail; uncertainty does rule. This author does feel contrarian enough to offer a host of predictions. (4) This fact does not diminish the strength of my conviction that prediction cannot really be done, even though we need to attempt it. Unfortunately, we just do this rather poorly, largely through no fault of our own. Defense Planning, Surprise, and Prediction If you spend a lot of time talking about the future you can forget that you do not really know the subject. It is especially easy to forget one's basic ignorance when one is a defense planner. Why? First, we ask for a lot of funding, a great deal of society's scarce resources, so we need to persuade people that we know what we are doing. In the course of projecting a sense of confidence and assurance we can easily convince ourselves that we are behaving wisely. Second, because we are planning to buy forces for a long period out into the future--think of the 30-year-plus lifetimes of major military platforms--we can acquire the belief that we are constructing our future. Therefore, we control our future by making decisions regarding defense planning and acquisition. Alas, the facts are that the future has not happened, and no amount of planning can make it visible to our gaze today. This incongruence is not to say that we are entirely ignorant about the future. Of course, we are not. It does mean that we would be well-advised not to use the all-too-familiar phrase, "the foreseeable future." The future is not foreseeable, at least not in a very useful sense. (5) The challenge is to cope with uncertainty, not try to diminish it. That cannot be done reliably. Such ill-fated attempts will place us on the road to ruin through the creation of unsound expectations. Defense planning needs to be based on political guidance, and that guidance should make its assumptions explicit. Sometimes we neglect this, and the oversight can prove costly. Conditions, which is to say contexts, can change, and so should the working assumptions behind policy. You can forget what your assumptions have been if you forgot to make them explicit. …