In the civilian world, they have their news-cycle where everything has to be a crisis. Everything is always at a critical juncture. Once you focus on one issue, three more jump out of the news bushes to clasp their needle-teethed jaws around your ankles. People lose sleep, worry, and never really find out what is going on as they go from one ratings-generating OMG! to the other.
Though at a slightly slower pace, we have a similar problem in the military . Every 2/3rd of a POM or so, there is a new buzzword or “exciting new insight.” A2AD, Distributed Lethality, RMA, TQL, MOOTW, Transformationalism, Hybrid Warfare – pick your pet phrase of the last two decades.
We also see a habit in synch with our FITREP/EVAL language; hyperbole. More often than not, reasoned discussion is given the pass, but instead there is a gap, a crisis, or something else is unprecedented, transformational, or the byproduct of something so esoteric that it takes a multi-billion dollar key and 20-months soaking in pixie-dust to unlock its enlightenment.
In almost all cases, if you open the aperture a bit, back up, talk to your local military historian, or better yet – to quote Lloyd Cole, “Lean over on the bookcase, if you really want to get straight” – read up on a topic and soon you will find that we have been here before.
The challenges we face are not really that new, insurmountable, or unknown. Indeed, compared to even recent challenges, they may be picayune by comparison.
Along those lines, I’d invite you to give a read the latest by Warrant Officer Paul Barnes, British Army over at West Point’s Modern War Institute, and acquaint yourself with two new words; neophilia and presentism;
It is often treated as an assumed truth in Western defense establishments that the world is experiencing a period of political instability unparalleled in over a century. This belief, combined with the observation that technology and its effect on society are advancing at an unprecedented rate, have become key drivers of military transformation. Evidentially, believers in this notion of exceptional instability point to recent, multiple emergent threats to the liberal rules-based system—the Russian invasion of Georgia in 2008 and annexation of Crimea in 2014, Chinese attempts to control access to the South China Sea, and the actions of belligerents in civil wars in Syria and Yemen, for example. At the same time, technologists use advances in information and cyber technology, artificial intelligence, and autonomy, to rationalize their own arguments regarding military transformation. Their case seems compelling from an early twenty-first-century perspective. But perhaps more important than what is seen—the trends of eroding stability and rapidly growing technological advancement—is the lens through which these are viewed. When that lens is characterized by presentism and neophilia, rather than placing the present in the context of history, the consequences might be dire.
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The period between the First and Second World Wars was arguably more complex; indeed, with the exception of the twenty years following the fall of the Berlin Wall, it is difficult to recall a time when international relations were not at least as complicated as those currently experienced. In terms of social and technical change, the era in which we live is actually relatively unremarkable, certainly less disruptive than the Industrial Revolution and the technical evolutions that followed it.
When people feel they are in crisis or faced with something new, they often respond in an ineffective and inefficient manner. They miss the opportunity to reference the lessons learned by previous generations or, at least, benchmark the scale of their problem compared to other ones already addressed and overcome.
Ultimately, the cult of neophilia is a symptom of intellectual laziness—a trope built on simplistic memes and the mistake of conflating disconnected occurrences. In defense terms, those who promote ideas like hybrid warfare and non-physical domains are boxing at shadows, in danger of creating a substantial threat where there is none—a digital blitzkrieg. The current age is far less unique than acolytes of presentism would have us believe. Practitioners and academics should therefore be wary of easy explanations and attractive narratives, instead concentrating on countering threats, while understanding that our adversaries asymmetric answer to the West’s conventional dominance comes from a place of weakness. Precision-enabled, combined-arms warfare, despite its dependence on vulnerable networked information, is still the key to success in war.
There is precious little that is new in the profession of arms. Tools and time/distance may change, but little is really new.
As military professionals, it is our job to be the first to understand that. The civilian political leaders we serve do not have the same background as we do – in times of crisis they look to us for perspective. What service are we offering if at every crisis, we respond with wide-eyed wonder?
