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McNair Paper 63, All Possible Wars?
Towards a Consensus View of the Future Security Environment, 2001-2025, November
2000
Chapter Three Using the Future-- Some Caveats
To the extent we foresee the future and effectively address it, then the future will not develop as we anticipated it. --Richard Danzig51
No plan survives contact with the enemy. --Helmuth von Moltke52
Perhaps the most telling historical example of these dangers is the development of the British "Ten-Year Rule," and its subsequent unquestioned implementation in the years between the First and Second World Wars. Between 1919 and 1932, the British Cabinet officially advised the service ministries that "major war was not to be anticipated or prepared for at least ten years."53 This estimate may have, in fact, held a degree of validity based on a survey of the world in 1919, following the defeat and exhaustion of the German-led Triple Alliance at the hands of a world-wide coalition that included even Japan. But its intent as a budgeting tool, intended to reduce the drain of defense expenditures on the British economy, discouraged systematic reassessment. There is no evidence that any such official reassessment or update in light of world events was ever seriously considered. What was ostensibly a working hypothesis became a barrier against planning for "remote contingencies or ones which were 'beyond the financial capacity of the country to provide against' (italics in original)."54 A direct result was the defeat of British expeditionary forces on the European continent in 1940, and, even more dramatic, the complete collapse of the British Empire's Far East defenses in the initial Japanese onslaught--an event that independent estimates began to warn against in the 1920s. "The general consensus of opinion is that while there was much to be said for some broad guideline in the years immediately after 1918, it was a mistake to confirm the Rule in 1928, and put it on a moving basis so that the assumption of ten years' peace was pushed into the indefinite future."55 The problem of the convenient official assessment was that "ten years is an extremely long time in terms of international relations, but a comparatively short time for a largely disarmed and pacific democracy to rearm for a major war against more than one potential enemy."56 But the potential for the retention of originally accurate forecasts in a changing future is not the sole potential pothole in the path of futures assessments. In addition to the unwarranted belief in certainty, there are at least four other factors that justify caveats: the inclusion of normative assessments, institutional bias, emotional reaction of individuals, and the effect of taking action. Unwarranted Belief The information age holds the potential for compounding the problems generated by an unwarranted belief in a high degree of certainty. Repeated in multiple media, popular forecasts tend to become common knowledge, and are treated as if proven fact or certain outcome. Such forecasts range from the inevitability of global warming to the irreversibility of the expansion of democratic governance throughout the world. The result is a form of group-think that narrows the popular view of plausible futures. When expectations are later contradicted by events, the results are often shock, surprise, recrimination, and disillusionment. In planning for warfare, the results can be disastrous. There is a definite linkage between the repetition of an assessment and its popular acceptance as certain. This holds a certain similarity to mass propaganda in totalitarian societies, referred to as "the big lie" technique. It is often argued that the proliferation of modern media is causing the breakdown of governmental control of information in autocratic nations, and there is ample evidence that such has occurred.57 However, we cannot discount the historical use of the media by totalitarian regimes to buttress their legitimacy. Under such manipulation, even a plausible assessment of the future can be transformed into unquestioned theology. An excellent example can be found in the history of Marxism-Leninism. It can be argued that both Karl Marx's world of the 1840s and the post-First World War Europe of Lenin's Bolshevik coup genuinely appeared to be ripe for revolutions by industrialized workers. However, the forecast of workers' revolts was transformed into an ideology of fomenting revolution, and then to a theology of the inevitability of communism. Despite its continuing efforts to foment world revolutions, the Soviet Union was unable to replicate the conditions prescribed in Marxist theory, nor force the rest of the industrialized world to do so. Moreover, the theology of inevitability discouraged efforts to reform communism to match the reality of the world economy. By the time Mikhail Gorbachev attempted to introduce reforms, his de facto repudiation of the theology of inevitability caused the complete collapse of the intellectual underpinnings of Marxism-Leninism. Even if the reforms were successful in prolonging the life of the Soviet Union, the forecast of a communist future was shattered forever. Open societies, awash with information, would seem immune from the unwarranted certainty of forecasts. However, the very plethora of information, with many sources repeating the same assessment, serves to make forecasts appear universal and more certain than a detailed study of their sources would indicate. Political elites may be even more susceptible than tabloid readers, due to their behavior of "constant media grazing."58 Through repetition, a forecast can become the intellectual version of an urban legend, providing a fascinating myth of dubious plausibility. Normative Assessments A significant factor in the transformation of assessment into ideology is the influence of normative desires. Futures assessments, even those based on linear trends in the development of technology, inherently carry the biases of the assessors. Such is inevitable in every social science; humans are unable to stay neutral about human behavior. At its best, realistic forecasting (a description which itself is value-laden) strives to be value explicit rather than value free or value neutral.59 The inclusion of normative desires in futures assessments is almost routine. Largely, it extends from "the utopian tradition in ancient and modern literature."60 The unfortunate aspect is that normative forecasting is often presented as scholarly futures assessment, and a frequent topic of normative forecasting is security planning. The agenda is not always as wonderfully evident as that of a recent article--ostensibly a futures forecast--by United Nations Peace University chancellor and former Assistant Secretary General Robert Muller, entitled "The Absolute Urgent Need for Proper Earth Government."61 Because various arms of the UN promote futures research, and many normative forecasts are published through organizations such as the World Future Society, it is often difficult to separate rigorous, dispassionate assessments of probable futures from optimistic views of the futures that we might prefer.62 In the realm of policymaking, the rigorous and the optimistic often compete for attention and acceptance without always being distinguished. Defense planning does not necessarily remain free from normative assessments. By its very nature, the national security strategy of the United States has as its objective the national security of the United States, and the use of futures assessment is colored by that objective. The very insurance policy nature of defense planning puts a premium on the identification of worst case scenarios. This need not mean that legitimate futures assessments are bent so as to discard plausibility. But it does mean that the existence of such an objective, in itself, colors the likely interpretation of what is plausible. Institutional Bias Institutions and organizations, like individuals, have inherent biases. Such biases do not have to be products of deliberate distortion, but may evolve from seeing the world from a particular, often unique, viewpoint. Within the Department of Defense, the individual military services have unique cultures that have evolved from historical experience and the mediums in which they operate. These "masks of war" are filters through which past, present, and future are viewed.63 Likewise, the various other departments of the Federal government that are involved in international relations have distinctive viewpoints shaped by interaction with their immediate constituencies. There is nothing particularly sinister in the fact that the Department of Agriculture puts a higher premium on facilitating overseas grain sales than on signaling U.S. displeasure toward another nation's espionage. It is natural that the Department of Commerce is primarily focused on the benefits of foreign sales of U.S. high technology, while the Department of Defense is more concerned with the potential use of such technologies in strengthening the military capabilities of potential opponents. As our primary organization for international negotiation, it is likely that the Department of State would characterize the international environment as having a degree of cooperative behavior between nations, while the Defense Department would look to the potential for conflict. Similarly, it is natural that nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) would have perspectives different from governmental agencies and, most likely, different from each other. Their viewpoints are partly directed by the particular issue they were formed to address. Researchers have wildly varying perspectives, based on personal beliefs and institutional affiliations. Assessing possible futures is not necessarily a "where you sit is where you stand" exercise, as much as it is a "your view is your viewpoint" situation in which personal experience and ideology provide the telescope through which the future horizon is examined. A telescope can bring distant images into clear focus, but at the cost of narrowing the panorama to pupil-width.64 This can be compounded by normative desires of what the future should be like and fanned by the rhetoric of scenario building in which participants are advised to create their future. Emotional Reactions The fact that we are human has two effects on interpretations of the future. On one side it can give us greater understanding. On the reverse, it clouds our judgment. In a recent address, Brian Sullivan, a scholar who has been involved in Department of Defense futures work, argued that, while specific future events cannot be predicted, the "history of the future" can be predicted because it is based on human nature, a subject of which we have some understanding.65 In Sullivan's construct, previous historical events provide the range of probable futures. While current trends and technologies may create the setting, the primary driver is human emotions, such as desires for greatness, gain, or revenge. Thus, for example, given the corrupting nature of absolute power and the particular circumstances of his regime, we should expect that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein will act in ways similar to Adolf Hitler in attempting to create his desired world order. His moves, therefore, are predictable. The problem with this approach is not necessarily the methodology, but the fact that there is no common acceptance of what constitutes human nature, and that popular views on its nature tend to change. There is an immutable division between those who view human nature as basically saintly and those who view it as basically sinful. And, as previously observed, there is a division of interpretation based on experience. President George Bush and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher had no problem describing Saddam Hussein as a Hitler; both had witnessed the consequences of Hitler's actions. Their viewpoints were colored by their previous views. Others, particularly those born some generations after the Second World War, may have felt uncomfortable with what they considered inflammatory rhetoric. Yet, in theory, an understanding of human nature should be a useful tool, and probably deserves more attention than it has received thus far in studies of the future.66 On the reverse side, emotional reactions to plausible futures is a factor in determining the range of alternative futures acceptable to study. Witness reactions to both Herman Kahn's initial "thinking the unthinkable" and initial nuclear war fighting assessments of the Reagan administration. Both cases evoked condemnation for the very fact they contemplated so horrible a future, a future whose very contemplation was deemed to increase its likelihood of coming about.67 Based on factual data alone, the potential for a Cold War nuclear exchange was a very plausible forecast. But, like contemporary understanding of the enormity of the Holocaust, it was a plausible occurrence that many deemed too grotesque to recognize. While genocide and nuclear war may be extreme cases, there is an evident human inclination to recoil from dire forecasts, no matter their merit. For example, even the most ardent of environmental NGOs fundamentally believes--as an organization--that the human race can and will prevent environmental catastrophe from coming about, if only it would listen to reason. War itself is such an emotional topic that it is difficult to separate our desire to prevent it from our understanding of its causes. Our preference for a more peaceful future and our emotional reaction to presentations that portray it as unlikely have at least an indirect, if unrecognized, effect on our defense planning. Effects of Action Perhaps the most significant difficulty in developing futures assessments and translating them into policies and actions is the fact that all actions taken have the inherent effect of changing the future. The observations made by Secretary of the Navy Danzig and German General von Moltke at the beginning of the chapter apply here; execution of a plan changes the conditions that inspired it. The dynamics of this change increase through the unfolding of competing actions, such as the plans of a wartime enemy, or his counter-thrusts. In a sense, the future is never what we think it will be, only what our actions--with a whole host of potential unintended consequences--create. Arguably, the transformation of the immediate post-Cold War world is an example of the consequences--in this case, negative--of this prediction/action (or inaction) cycle. In the immediate aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union, the conventional (and overwhelming) wisdom was that the development of free markets and democratization of Russia and the entire world was inevitable. Market economists argued that it was a natural process.68 Assumptions were made concerning the expected development of international cooperation. Analysts who suggested that Russia could remain a military threat to the West were dismissed. The result was considerable pressure to take a restrained approach in helping to develop the Russian economic system and cementing mechanisms for bilateral foreign policy cooperation, because it was perceived that the inevitable result made such actions unnecessary.69 Unfortunately, the miracle of a stable Russian market economy now seems further off than in 1992, as economic oligarchs dominate. Russian support for American-led action for the liberation of Kuwait in 1991 was not matched in the case of NATO actions in Kosovo in 1999. Along with the previous enlargement of NATO membership, the actions in Kosovo were harshly criticized by the Russian government. At the same time, political liberalism did not continue to spread at its anticipated exponential rate. While American inaction was certainly not the cause of such events, it is obvious that the anticipation of an inevitably benign future shaped the actions and inaction that occurred. The result was that the future did not occur as we expected. This does not mean that we should not continue to assess and therefore anticipate the future. Rather, it suggests that the translation of futures assessment into policy is similar to the practice of deterrence. It is impossible to certify when deterrence is effective, only when it is not. If a war does not occur, how can anyone tell whether it was deterred or what means deterred it? In the theory of strategic nuclear deterrence, a whole series of future actions and reactions were assumed to be prevented by the threat of punishment or denial. In their abstract theorizing of action and reaction, many analysts argued that it was in the interest of the United States to remain vulnerable to Soviet attack. An attempt to develop invulnerable defenses, it was argued, could cause a "use `em or lose `em" attack, or, in a more cynical assessment, encourage an invulnerable United States to attack the Soviet Union. Since a nuclear war between the superpowers did not occur, the policy was, by default, correct. Unfortunately, the translation of deterrence theory into the prevention of conventional warfare has proven elusive.70 The fact that the United States had the most powerful military in the world and a nuclear arsenal failed to deter Saddam Hussein from his fateful actions. Yet, does the invasion of Kuwait invalidate the theory of deterrence? How many other potential invasions--such as on the Korean peninsula--have been successfully deterred? The assessment of future security environments and corresponding actions to prevent threats from developing suffers the same analytical difficulties as the theory of deterrence. In a very real sense, the question of how much is enough in terms of spending on defense resources can never be answered. No one can ever be certain of what did not occur. The very act of preparation may deter the anticipated consequence. Or it may create unintended consequences. Sum of All Caveats The importance of recognizing the limitations of futures analysis and the historical caveats concerning its use lie in the realization that the acceptance of any assessment entails risk. As a starting point for defense planning the assessment of the future security environment is essential, but it cannot guarantee the success of any policy based on its premises. But because defense policymaking in a democracy is inherently a political process, the rhetoric of its debate is couched in certainties. As an example, the current argument over the development of a new generation of air superiority fighter is ultimately premised on assessments of the future. Proponents see American advantages in the air superiority mission as dwindling as current systems age and become more vulnerable. Opponents argue that current trends indicate that potential opponents are more likely to invest in ballistic and missile systems and not the manned aircraft that air superiority fighters are optimized to defeat. In a very real sense, both positions are correct. The issue is where to invest finite resources when there are a multitude of threats to defend against. Which potential threats can be risked with some assurance that there will be time to recover from the wrong investment decision? At the same time, it must be realized that the investment decision itself--whether right or wrong for that time--changes the future by encouraging counteractions by a potential opponent. That is why the issue of asymmetric warfare, the current focus of much defense analysis and debate, is such a difficult concept to operationalize and plan for.71 In essence, all decisions provoke asymmetric responses in the security environment. And that is also why worst case planning is so appealing; it is an attempt to neutralize the greatest potential risks.
Thus, the most critical aspect to assess is not necessarily what the future security environment will be, as much as what will happen if it suddenly changes. This strengthens the argument that the alternative scenario method--when properly utilized--may have the most to offer defense planning, precisely because, by its very construct, it postulates uncertainty. And this also brings us back to addressing the trap made evident in our opening example of the British Ten-Year Rule. In a dynamic security environment, an assessment of the future is only as valuable as its facility for being updated.
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