Dominic M. Lawson
Modern militaries are perhaps some of the most reliable people from which to understand how the world will change in the next century. While politicians or media pundits can afford to speculate, there are few things which require a more hard-nosed realism than military planning.
As such, armies and military organisations have entire units devoted to trying to understand the key trends which will define the coming years. Oftentimes, creating strategy reports for the eyes of military elites and policy-makers.
I previously covered one such report from the Pentagon which clarified the effects that climate change would have upon the United States.
The British Ministry Of Defence has also devoted significant resources to this question. The Global Strategic Trends: The Future Starts Today report, which aims to create a full picture of what we can expect the future to look like up to the year 2050, is the end result of this project.
The results of their study are insightful and will be of use to anyone curious about what the future holds for the world, but they also make grim reading.
The writers foresee intense changes in demographics, economic structures and how we govern global society but some of the other aspects of the report, gender inequality, religious extremism and corporate power, will appear familiar to everyone.
Demographics
The Ministry Of Defence forecasts a world in which advancements in technology, and more specifically the medical sector, will result in increased potential for human augmentation.
Much of this will be good, the human lifespan is likely to increase considerably for many people, with increased understanding of neuroscience meaning that we can stave off age-based diseases such as dementia and alzheimers.
The writers are also confident that antibiotic resistance, a fear which has rightly gripped scientists for some decades now, will be staved off by a better understanding of medical science and germ theory. However, the authors write that this will be prohibitively expensive, meaning that only the rich (of which there will be many) will be able to afford it.
This caveat; that the rich will monopolise many of the new advances in science, is common throughout the report. In the medical realm, this means that life extending therapies and genetic editing which had once appeared science fiction will be possible but, again, will only be distributed to those at the very top of the economic pyramid.
If correct, this will only embed inequality within societies, with those born to wealth not just having more opportunities, but also being able to enjoy greater ‘biological opportunity.’
I wrote previously that genetic editing could mean that the wealthy are able to ‘design’ their offspring to create children with desired characteristics, such as higher IQs which will give them an advantage in the future economy.
The writers deal a double blow by writing that the aging demographics of North America and Europe may mean that healthcare provisions become unaffordable for many wealthy states.
This will happen because we can expect populations to become dominated by the elderly, and a large portion of the working age population to be replaced by AI, essentially cutting the tax base which pays for medical care and welfare provisions.
Data from the Lancet supports this assertion. A report from 2020 predicts a collapse in populations throughout the developed world. China, the US and much of Europe will experience heavily aging societies who will have to support vast populations of older people. Certain countries, such as Spain, Italy and Portugal, will see their populations half in the coming century.
This isn’t true in the areas of the world which are still developing. Much of the Middle East and Africa are still expected to see their populations boom. We can expect to see Nigeria become one of the most populous states on Earth — with an estimated population of roughly 800 million by 2100. India, a country with a large impoverished population, will overtake China as the world’s most populous state.
Shifting Boundaries
This touches on another issue. At present, the areas of the world which will experience vast population growth are governed by states which are often weak or filled with internet division and corruption. And the writers expect this situation to worsen.
We will see the terminal weakening of nation-states. Traditional nations will be forced to confront rising nationalist and ethnic seperatist movements from below, and powerful corporations and predatory empires from above, meaning that many will essentially disintegrate.
Again, this will occur most in the developing world, where states are often the result of artificial boundaries created by European empires which do not take account of the multiple identities of the populations within them.
As populations boom, and migration occurs between and within them, our guides expect that many will be torn by internal violence which will often be motivated by ethnic or religious divisions.
Mid-2010’s Iraq and Syria may offer a glimpse of this future. When ISIS was able to take advantage of the Syrian war and conquer the territory it did, they showed the artificial nature of many modern borders.
We will probably see this happen near continuously in the next few decades, often in a less violent and heinous manner. Groups such as the Kurds, or nations like Catalunya or Chechnya may increasingly emerge upon the map.
Among the ruins of the disintegrating nations, modern city-states will could act as bastions of relative solidity.
By the mid-century the majority of human beings will be urban-dwellers. Cities already constitute the key drivers of economic growth and innovation, with about 80% of the globe’s GDP coming from the top 20.
Cities in the developing world will offer rare sources of employment for many of the world’s precatariet, and will see a large flow of people into them. Megacities will be formed by this growth. These are cities composed of 10 million or more residents. At present, Asia dominates this ranking, with Tokyo, Shanghai and New Delhi being the world’s most populous.
Soon, cities across Africa will join this ranking. In the poorest countries, many of these will be vast and overcrowded slums with weak governing structures and militarised police forces. Imagine the vertically built favelas of Rio De Janeiro, or the tightly packed urban centre of the Gaza Strip but on a colossal scale.
In many ways, this is a return to the norm. Up until the industrial revolution, the map was a patchwork of city-states, kingdoms, empires and corporate holdings. The future, the report posits, will be much like this. Thinking about the map as a clear cut grid will have to come to an end, and we will begin to see the world as a fluid, chaotic mess as many of our ancestors did.
Corporate Power
The flip side of these weaker governments means stronger corporations, and the report argues that we are likely to see corporate power increase like never before.
Large business entities will only continue to grow. They will, the report states, become increasingly able to infiltrate states across the planet through their lobbying efforts, or in the case of weak states by threatening and bribing.
Given that some companies already have market valuations greater than the GDPs of first world countries, this is probably correct.
Vast business networks with control over the entire supply chain already exist, Amazon has near total monopoly over the entire production line and the report warns that corporations could gain complete control over populations by creating relationships of dependency.
One industry which looks set to experience momumental growth is the market for private militaries. So-called PMC (private military contractor) companies will proliferate and become a greater presence in the world’s trouble spots.
Wars in the Greater Middle East have featured a growing proportion of private mercenaries, with America’s private soldiers now outnumbering official military in Afghanistan, and Russia’s Wagner corp replacing much of the Russian military in Syria.
Two years ago, the founder of one of America’s largest mercenary outfits lobbied congress to ‘privatise’ the Afghan war — essentially turning over the entire country to a private empire. While he was rejected, it’s not unfeasible that another company will be successful soon.
We’ll probably see a union of these companies with other corporate giants.
The report says this explicitly, citing the example of Shell in Nigeria who maintain a large force of contractors to guard oil rigs in the country. Other powerful corporations, such as Amazon, already employ ex-military forces to spy on unions, and direct international logistics efforts.
Data suggests that the market for Private Military Contractors (PMCs) will grow at 7.5 a year, and could be worth half a trillion by the end of this decade.
This confluence of corporate resources and military power is another area in which we see similarities to the middle ages. In the age before national states had the monopoly on violence, it was not uncommon for private businesses to employ armies of mercenaries to enforce their interests.
History is replete with private armies which were often more powerful than state militaries, the Free Companies of the Medieval Europe, or the army of the East India Company are only some examples.
Forecasting Fatigue
Overall, the by-word of the report is ‘complexity.’ The writers expect Earth to become a dizzying mess of intense inequality, rapid movement of people and money and constant change. Every area of our lives is to accelerate.
A caveat worth remembering is the source of the report itself. Strategists are, like anyone, biased and self-interested. Military elites are people who benefit from government funding that will increase if politicians foresee dangerous horizons.
Also, forecasting is an art which will never be completely accurate. The possibility of ‘black swan’ events which ripple throughout the system and entirely disrupt the path we were on simply cannot be accounted for. To be fair to the writers, they even admit this and introduce the idea that the increasing complexity of the world and its interconnected nature means that we are now more prone to generating black swans with revolutionary possibilities.
Human beings are simply not designed to deal with high level complexity and how we adapt to this deluge of information and change will decide whether the report is correct in its predictions or whether we can harness the technological changes that are coming to create a world which better shares the wealth and intellectual potential of our species.
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