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https://warontherocks.com/2018/04/forecasting-the-future-of-warfare/
FORECASTING THE FUTURE OF WARFARE
ROBERT H. SCALES APRIL 9, 2018
COMMENTARY
“No one in this room can accurately predict the future, least of all me. The nature of war is never gonna change. But the character of war is changing before our eyes — with the introduction of a lot of technology, a lot of societal changes with urbanization and a wide variety of other factors.”
-Gen. Mark Miller at the Association of the U.S. Army Convention, 2017
The Army’s decision to create a “Futures Command” is long overdue, well-intended, and absolutely necessary if the Army is to emerge from the malaise that has held modernization in its vice for all of this new century. But accelerating the pace of modernization without a rigorous understanding of how militaries anticipate the future of war might run the risk of creating an accelerating engine with greater thrust, but no vectors.
I’ve spent almost three decades studying the art and science of future gazing. The high point of my immersion as a futurist began in 1991 when then Army Chief of Staff Gen. Gordon Sullivan, entrusted me with writing the Army’s official history of the Gulf War, Certain Victory. Three years later, in 1995 another chief of staff, Gen. Dennis Reimer, gave me the mission of looking into the deep future of warfare, beyond 2020 to 2025. As head of the Army After Next project, I had access to an enormously talented group of young officers, many of whom are still doing great work today. With the assistance of my deputy, Col. Bob Killebrew, we invented the Army’s first strategic game, which continues today in heavily modified form as Unified Quest.
Army After Next was a magical time. To quote Killebrew:
We never stopped slam-bang arguments over the direction of land warfare that rattled the windows at Fort Monroe. We were secure enough to tolerate and encourage a kind of no-holds-barred intellectual combat that raged inside TRADOC’s doctrine directorate from 1995-97, when rank bowed to ideas and bureaucracy to improvisation, risky experimentation and, very occasionally, success.
As the Army seeks to resume its effort to look into the future it would also be useful to look back 25 years to examine how the Army’s first effort at a disciplined approach to divining the future was created. The target year of the Army After Next study was 2025. That end point is quickly approaching. Perhaps a critical look back might allow today’s futurists to grade our work. If they judge that we got it close to right, then perhaps they will have confidence that borrowing our ideas might help guide them along signposts pointing to war in 2045 and beyond.
Michael Howard, the imminent scholar and military strategist, once observed that the purpose of future gazing in war is not to get it right, but to avoid getting it terribly wrong. He expressed a truism that practical soldiers leaned through experience: war is the most complex and unpredictable of all human enterprises. Unlike law, business, or science, soldiers (thankfully) practice their craft infrequently. Soldiers are reluctant to hypothesize about the future because war is a high stakes game. Getting it wrong costs lives and catastrophic failure threatens survival of the state.
Today, as Gen. Milley suggested above, the art of predicting the course of war is made far more difficult by a quickening of the rate of change among those variables most likely to influence conflict such as technology, domestic politics, and international events. While the pace of influencing events is accelerating the capacity of militaries to build weapons and structures to accommodate change is slowing. Thus soldiers today must cast farther and farther out to stay ahead. The farther out the time horizon, the more indistinct the view becomes, and the more likely soldiers are to get it terribly wrong.
Two decades on I still live with the guilt of having failed to turn Army After Next into a viable operational concept. In the end, success is not measured by the elegance of ideas but by how the Army weaponizes and structures itself to implement the ideas. As my good friend and co-author Wick Murray wrote in his iconic book Innovation in the Interwar Period:
Messiahs are not enough; they need disciples. One way to further the idea of innovations is to institutionalize it in a service’s school systems. This ploy, exploited in every nation, proved inadequate. Another battleground for the hearts and minds of the officer corps has been the writing of doctrinal manuals. Again, the reformers met with considerable success, but these victories of words on paper did not suffice. In the end, the only sign of victory for reformers were real operational units that could perform wartime missions.
In the end, my Army After Next team failed to translate our victory of words on paper into real operational units. But I think wisdom can be found in a failure that should act as a cautionary tale — one that demonstrates how tomorrow’s future gazers can get it right.
Army After Next and Army XXI: A Brief History of Failures
By 1997, our Army After Next team believed they had accumulated enough evidence to begin a visioning process in earnest. Subsequent events would reveal we suffered from one very serious miscalculation that would hamper all the Army’s attempts to get the future right for decades to come. It all came down to timing, what I term “early lock versus late lock.”
Let me explain.
The object of future gazing is not only to predict what organizations, doctrine, and technologies are the right ones, but also to estimate when these three primal warfighting variables will be mature enough to be applied to create combat units. “Lock in” occurs when an Army translates visions, concepts, and ideas into real things, to “operationalize” them to use the common term. Lock too soon and the three variables may not be developed sufficiently to fit into operational units. Lock too late and run the risk of making yesterday perfect.
Sadly, in the 1990s the Army made both mistakes at once and it is still suffering the consequences. I believe (as you will read in a minute) we had our Army After Next concepts right. But we locked too soon. We simply misjudged the rate at which essential technologies would mature. We then made the fatal mistake of trying to apply them too soon: early lock. In a word, the organizational and materiel manifestations of Army After Next — what would eventually become the Future Combat Systems in 2003 were not ready at the time we attempted to turn ideas and concepts into operational units.
In our study, we concluded that strategic speed necessary to arrive quickly could only be achieved by unburdening the operational force. That meant lighter fighting vehicles, a thin if not missing logistical umbilical cord, and the substitution of aerial systems to replace ground systems. In particular, we foresaw that fires, information, and sensors would gravitate into the third dimension. But we locked too early. The technologies essential for the success of Future Combat Systems weren’t ready for prime time in 2000. Sadly, 12 years later most would mature but by then the operationalized spawn of Army After Next — Future Combat Systems — was dead and $18 billion dollars went down the drain.
The Army leadership wisely chose another time horizon closer in for its near-term future gazing experiment, Army XXI. Army XXI was a classic example of late lock. The materiel manifestation was more corrosive than Army After Next because its experimental manifestation, the Army Warfighting Experiments. These were expensive and yielded few insights into where war was actually headed. They failed because their near-term focus only served to revalidate the Army’s bias toward sustaining the heavy force of Desert Storm.
In a strange twist of irony, the Army’s intermediate effort, the Objective Force, turned out to be a comparative success. The Objective Force emerged in 1999 after the Army was embarrassed by its inability to move Task Force Eagle from Germany to Albania. Task Force Eagle consisted of a battalion of AH 64 attack helicopters with its attached security and logistics. The unit was to be stationed at an abandoned Soviet airbase at Tusla, Albania. This strategic repositioning should have taken a week or less. It took over two months.
This public failure of strategic mobility only reinforced the opinion among the Washington elites that the U.S. Army had become a giant beached whale incapable of maneuvering over long distances. This opinion buttressed the air service’s contention that future wars could be won in the air long before the Army could arrive ready to fight. In light of these opinions, the Clinton Administration was contemplating reducing the Army’s conventional force from ten to eight divisions.
Gen. Erick Shinseki, Army chief of staff at the time, decided that the Objective Force would be a gap filler between Army After Next and Army XXI. The concept was simple: Graft an existing eight wheeled fighting vehicle, the Stryker, into a light infantry brigade formation. During the early days of the Iraq War these Stryker brigades proved invaluable as “middle weight” forces sufficiently protected and armed yet capable of moving over great distances. Stryker was, almost accidentally, a perfect “right lock” solution for a warfighting contingency no one predicted in 1999. It remains, arguably, the only materiel success since the “Big Five” (the Abrams, Bradley, Apache, Blackhawk, and Patriot) of the 1970s.
It’s been a decade since the demise of Future Combat Systems. Over the years I’ve tried time and again to reconcile how a legitimate process of future gazing led to such serious and expensive operational failure. One answer is that it did not fail. Perhaps it was only suspended momentarily. In light of current events one could argue that 9/11 caused the course of conventional war to hit the pause button and that it’s now time to hit “resume play.” Spend some time reading our insights from 1999 and make your own judgments.
Army After Next: How it Worked
From the start, the Army After Next team concluded that without some rigor and discipline, the future gazing process would be limited to speculative ruminations of the senior officer present. We began our inquiry by developing a structured methodology to add rigor. Then we created a hypothesis (or a series of hypotheses) that offered the greatest chance of not getting the future terribly wrong. Third, we spent many months gathering evidence, an admittedly ephemeral process for investigating events that had yet to occur. Eventually, we discovered three sources of evidence.
History
To be sure, there is danger in steering a car using only the rear-view mirror, but there is a greater risk in pressing ahead without a look at where we are driving from. But we were comforted with the truism, paraphrased from the eminent strategist, Colin Gray, that “war is war, only the grammar changes.” Clearly, the grammar gets less intelligible the farther time recedes. The utility of historical analogizing also becomes less reliable if the course of backward gazing is discontinuous. Small wrinkles in the fabric are not terribly concerning: The transition from coal to petroleum-fired propulsion caused only minor conceptual revisions in Naval doctrine after the Great War. Relevance becomes a problem when rends in the fabric appear: sail to steam propulsion in the nineteenth century, for example.
During our historical inquiry into the course of industrial age warfare we identified several wrinkles and one serious rend. The final days of World War II tore the contextual fabric of warfare fundamentally. The atomic bomb ended great power conflict. The collapse of European military and economic might ended the European Era of warfare, a five hundred epoch that had seen European armies and navies colonize three quarters of the planet. The collapse ushered in the American Era. We knew America would not fight all post-World War II conflicts but its long shadow would influence all wars to come.
Wrinkles in time would occasionally nudge the course of war. Postcolonial wars would emerge below the nuclear threshold and under the umbrella of the great powers. Airpower would be the premise for American engagement in future wars. Precision guidance, micro circuitry, unmanned vehicles, and stealth would shape the geometry of future battlefields. We completely missed the world after 9/11. Whether it was a rend or a wrinkle remains to be discovered.
The Present
We intentionally violated the old saw that generals should never fight the next war like the last. Our study convinced us that last wars offered brief, often dimly lit glimpses of the key variables that would likely be repeated in the next. The genius is in finding the right ones. After World War I the Great powers knew that internal combustion and wireless telegraphy were the ingredients most likely to alter war-making. The early winners in World War II battles picked the right ones and operationalized and weaponized them most efficiently. Thus, we were compelled to sift through the tea leaves of contemporary wars at the time to include Desert Storm, Panama, the Balkans, and the emerging threat of terrorism.
We were most influenced by Desert Storm, and not in a good way. At the time the Army was under fire for being too slow to the fight. The Army After Next team weighed the dichotomy of arriving quickly but too light versus arriving heavy in combat power but too late. Solving this dichotomy formed the nexus of our investigation into the future. We believed the only means for solving this dilemma was to devise a strategic landpower wargame that tested the comparative merits of light (Army After Next), medium (Objective Force) and heavy (Army XXI) forces.
Wargames
The preponderance of our evidence came from gaming. The gaming methodology we devised in 1995 is still with us in the form of the Unified Quest game conducted yearly at the Army War College. The Army had never done strategic future gazing before, so we were obliged to start by grafting the structure and operational concept borrowed from the Navy’s Global game conducted at the Navy War College on to our game. At the time, Global was the gold standard for all strategic games. We pledged to anchor our version of the game on two pillars: one, to get as close to right as the evidence and gaming methodology allowed and, two, to conduct the game with openness and fidelity.
Eventually, the game evolved into a melding of the Global game’s structures with the proven objectivity imbedded in the Army’s National Training Center methodologies. Most essential was the rule that the game would be “free play” and not scripted. We learned from the National Training Center experience that losing a battle often conveyed more wisdom than winning. But games at the strategic level were very public and closely watched by those who paid our bills. It took long and passionate discussions with the Army’s senior leadership to allow the prospect of losing in a national level game.
Building on the National Training Center motif we worked very hard to create a world-class opposing force. Over time we brought aboard diabolically creative “enemies” like retired Col. Richard Sinnreich and Marine Gen. Paul van Riper. We also borrowed the idea of employing a band of experienced strategic “observer/controllers” to referee the game and enough digitized data collection to capture “ground truth” from the National Training Center. We took the risk of inviting well-known Beltway luminaries to play the roles of administration and service officials and leaders. These people were experienced enough to smell a set up. We knew from the start that any attempt to “cook the books” would compromise the game fatally.
Our greatest initial miscalculation, one we inherited from Global, was our decision to base evidence collection on a single massive, signature game. To be sure, the first game was a hugely successful public relations exercise involving over 600 players and observers. But in the end, we gained very little useful data. In time, we changed our approach to embrace a “constellation” of franchise games scattered across many venues with each game focused on a different variable such as logistics, intelligence, maneuver, and command and control.
Thanks to a quarter century’s leap ahead in information technology, it is now possible to expand a constellation several orders of magnitude. Instead of four or five data points, a well-constructed strategic game might be able to collect hundreds of gaming variations testing thousands of discrete data points. To be sure, the Army’s leadership will still expect a grand event every year. But instead of a single game, perhaps a better idea might be to orchestrate a grand Army After Next, several months after all gaming data has been properly analyzed and parsed.
We can learn a few additional lessons from other failed strategic games that followed Army After Next. First, never restart a game when some “black swan” event rears its ugly head. As we learned painfully from the events of 9/11, black swans are a periodic feature of warfare and any strategic game worth its mettle must be able to accommodate them. Second, keep the game unclassified yet retain as much as possible actual state and non-state players using real geography. Third, don’t build a game around the intent to prove the efficacy of a specific weapon, program or concept. Global lost its credibility because the Navy dedicated every game to proving the need for aircraft carriers (with the added imperative not to loses one).
Be sure to insert a “red handle” to allow any player to stop the game. During our first Army After Next game, we postulated the capability to project ground units from the Continental U.S. directly into the operational area. One very astute DARPA scientist pulled the red handle and stopped the game. He very succinctly reminded us that the laws of physics and our continued reliance on fossil fuels would make direct intervention from the United States impossible. His intercession was important because it made the leadership reformulate the game to add intermediate bases for operational staging. Then we discovered such bases were under the enemy’s WMD umbrella thus forcing us to add air defense and base defense forces, which forced us to radically change our strategic lift requirements — you get the picture.
The Navy’s Global game relied on the creation of “scenarios” most of which were based on extensions of existing national security documents. We found this approach to be a bad idea. One simply cannot credibly extend contemporary strategy beyond a generation. Instead we found it more useful to write a “History of the Future.” We began with general but immutable characteristics of the future: national character, cultural affinities, recurrent behaviors, and personalities of foreign leaders and then added the nuances inherent in the geostrategic positioning of a postulated enemy state. Other facts could be reliably inferred such as economic power or evolving demographics, as well as a country’s technological and intellectual base and it’s relationships with neighboring competitors.
(Continued)