Since the end of the Cold War, how good has the military and diplomatic establishment been at predicting “the next war” or “the next crisis?”
Not very good is the most charitable answer. We have an even worse record of seeing, much less preparing for, the 2nd and 3rd order effects of our reactions when we respond to an emerging event, challenge, or opportunity.
We do like to think we know what the future holds. We get so confident in our experts and knowledge that we carefully craft programs and personnel program that rest not just on perfect foresight, but our equally perfect performance. The PPT so clearly describes how, it much be true.
Exquisitely designed concepts and designs have one critical weakness, they are exceptionally brittle to change and the unexpected.
There is a multiverse of possible futures based on what assumptions are right, wrong, or missed. Each fork taken, circle back, and roundabout that is history’s path expands the multiverse from today’s vision of what the expected future universe will be.
The more chaotic the present and near future is, the greater the number of possible futures there can be.
As such, would this not require of those planning for the future to avoid exquisitely fragile CONOPS, and instead design a more flexible posture?
A classic example; why would we design a Marine Corps for a WESTPAC battle when history shows that we rarely fight the set piece battles we lay out. Will the equipment, training, and subsequent capabilities we have for such a tailor made force be able to quickly transition to a battle in a northern latitude tundra, South American jungle, retake strategic Indian Ocean islands, or fight its way to an inland objective on a short timeline? Pick your vignette, there are a dozen that are equally likely to be made flesh.
What if we knew that in spite of the very chaotic present, that we should expect the future years to increase in complexity and chaos? How should that impact not just our Marines, but our Navy’s fleet design?
To add to it – how do you do that once you accept that the decades of a fat military budgets are drawing to a close?
Regulars here are fully up to speed with the warnings I have been giving since FEB 2010 about what I coined the “Terrible 20s.”
Of course, I was focused on the military budget side of things that sprouted from a seed planted in my skull by a couple of my economics professors in the 1980s. It was reinforced by emerging demographics and the trends I saw when DC bloated and all appetite was lost to control spending on social programs.
I realized earlier this week that greater minds than mine didn’t just see the wedge I saw, they saw the whole pie.
I’ll just put out a few graphs and pull quotes, but you need to invest some time with the galaxy brain observations by Peter Turchin and his associates.
The forecast they gave for 2010-20 a decade ago that brought us up to today that they call the, “Turbulent Twenties.”
Structural-demographic analysts the trend reversal in socio-political instability was not a surprise for two reasons. First, historical analysis shows that peaceful periods lasting one or two generations (25–50 years) are very common in history. They tend to occur during the “integrative phases” of structural-demographic cycles [12]. They are invariably (at least in all historical cases that 291 have been studied in detail so far) succeeded by disintegrative phases, characterized by surging collective violence, state breakdown, and recurrent civil war.
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Second, our understanding of why instability trends are periodically reversed, resulting in an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases, is much more sophisticated than simply an appeal to “cyclic history.” In fact, the oscillations between relatively peaceful and violent periods are not cycles with fixed periods. Rather, these somewhat irregular oscillations arise as a result of dynamical feedbacks that affect the functioning of social systems. In other words, if we want a reliable forecasting tool for when the next outbreak of violence occurs, what we don’t want to do is count how many years have passed since the last such outbreak. Instead, we want to quantify the structural pressures for instability.
While I was going by fingertip feel, these people have done the math.
This will sober you up.
Many of the historical “Golden Ages” were the golden ages only for the elites, whose high levels of consumption were based on low real wages and falling consumption levels of the great majority of the population. Furthermore, while declining living standards are often a contributing factor to the social pressures for instability, reversing this trend does not end instability until elite overproduction is also reversed (more detailed discussion in Chapter 10 of Ref. [12]).
Bingo. You can see this in the growing populist movements in every corner of the developing world, and the growing disconnect between income groups on a whole list of topics causing more opportunities for division inside even cohesive nations.
Their track record is solid.
Take some time to dive in and reflect that if these larger trends hold, are we best positioned to come out of this decade as we are going in?
Peter’s blog has some nice summaries. What has happened, and their report is data heavy, matches well;
Also from his blog, if you wondered what happened to civility and civil society the last decade or so … it isn’t social media or the internet.
We should aggressively challenge anyone who thinks they have a clear vision of what challenges this nation’s military will be asked to meet in 10, 20, or longer years. They simply do not know the place in time.
We need a more humble understanding about what we can see in detail, while at the same time keep an eye out for the larger currents that will hopefully signal their speed and direction. From these larger trends, your military challenges will spawn.
Be curious, open minded, and flexible. Ensure your force structure is the same.
