All Our Tomorrows
by James M. Smith
Category: Arms control

This is the 44th volume in the Occasional Paper series of the United States Air Force Institute for National Security Studies (INSS). This report summarizes a three-phase research project undertaken by the USAF Institute for National Security Studies on behalf of the Defense Threat Reduction Agency to forecast long-range global trends affecting arms control technologies. The report projects the international political, economic, and scientific environments to the year 2015. It posits economic and technological drivers as shaping the system, including its military and political dimensions. The result will be a two-tiered system, with great danger arising from significant proliferation in the second tier and the transition zone between tiers. The report next draws conclusions from this likely future for the scope, value, and practice of arms control. Arms control will be focused less on limitation and reduction of existing weapons, although the endgame between the United States and Russia will remain a significant effort. The focus will shift to the less well-defined realm of counterproliferation, and to marginal, failing, and failed states as well as nontraditional and non-state actors. New dimensions will be added, including control efforts toward small arms, advanced conventional weapons, military space, and information operations. The report then extrapolates from this future to assess the likely arms control technology requirements in cooperative, noncooperative, intrusive, and nonintrusive regimes. The projection here is continuing requirements for each of these specialized sets of technologies, with particular emphasis on multiple-use technologies for remote arms control compliance and verification monitoring as well as for intelligence detection and collection.