Predicting Future War

Abstract: This article assesses how we think about future war, drawing attention to its associated caveats, obstacles, and intellectual problems. It is divided into three sections: the first acknowledges that predicting the future is immensely problematic, but suggests history can be a critical guide. The second assesses the present and why it is difficult to conceive of accelerating change. The third examines the trends of future war. The article concludes with implications for US forces. Predicting the Future Operating Environment Throughout history, changes in the character of war have been I difficult for contemporaries to identify, particularly during long it periods of peace. While there may be trends and enduring principles of strategy and international relations, it is the variability of conditions, changes in the application of technology, adaptation, and the dynamics of conflict that make prediction, and consequently planning, very challenging. The problem of prediction has not prevented bold assertions, and some dystopian visions of the future have been propagated through sensationalist tracts and even, apparently, in serious scholarship. The modern prophets of doom who foresee a Hobbesian anarchy include such distinguished names as Robert Kaplan, Francis Fukuyama, Samuel B. Huntington and, albeit to a less apocalyptic extent, David Kilcullen. (1) Martin van Creveld and Philip Bobbitt suggest the state is in terminal decline in international affairs, opening the way for chaos and warfare. (2) Others claimed that war would be conducted "amongst the people" with dire results in terms of civilian casualties, and the official United Kingdom military doctrine of 2009 on future character of conflict referred, in solely negative terms, to a "hybrid" battlefield that would be inevitably "contested, congested, cluttered, connected and constrained. " (3) Works on global strategic trends predict a violent future amidst diminishing natural resources, climatic pressures, and global population growth. Nevertheless, such projections are starkly at odds with the conclusions of Steve Pinker, Andrew Mack, and Flavard Hegre, specifically that war, both minor and major, is in decline. (4) Statistical work at Uppsala University, incorporating all the standard drivers of conflict since 1945, forecast a reduction in the number of wars and in the overall casualty toll in the next fifty years. In the past, attempts to predict the future of war were just as contradictory. It was always tempting for contemporaries to hold on to strongly-held values and force structures and to downplay unpalatable truths. The selection of preferred assumptions, rather than absolute truths, was a common problem. Nevertheless, some projections, dismissed as absurd by contemporaries, proved accurate in time. Selection, exaggeration, absurdity, contemporary fears and preferences, misunderstanding, and misplaced long-range forecasts were the characteristics of predicting future war in the past, and all these traits still dominate the present. (5) There are many reasons why prediction is so difficult, even when there are apparently obvious positivist "trends" to guide us. It is tempting to make projections in the present based on the types of wars that seem the most prevalent today and to assume that, for the foreseeable future, all wars will fall into this pattern. Military analysts want to identify the characteristics of future war with some accuracy, not least because expensive technological development programs depend on their judgments, training of specialists is long term, and governments require success with the greatest efficiency. The difficulty is that success is contingent on context. Clarity in what the objective is must be essential, but the dynamics of war frequently change the conditions under which the conflict was entered. Aims, therefore, evolve just as rapidly and comprehensively as the conflict itself. Trends of the recent past give strong indications about war in the near future but still require caution. …