Cameron Ross
In 1960, British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow famously stated that it was a mathematical certainty that nuclear war would occur within the decade. Thankfully, despite his confident pronouncements about it being a scientific fact and something scientists knew “with the certainty of established truth,” nuclear weapons were never used in anger.[1] While Snow’s convictions seem silly today, he is by no means an aberration in his failure to foresee the future. After the Boston Tea Party, British Prime Minister Lord North assured the House of Commons that London could bring Boston back into compliance with four or five frigates and that military force was unnecessary.[2] French General Ferdinand Foch reportedly declared in 1904 that “airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value.”[3] Dick Cheney believed Iraqis would welcome Americans as liberators in Operation Iraqi Freedom. He also stated, “The Gulf War in the 1990s lasted five days on the ground. I can’t tell you if the use of force in Iraq today would last five days, or five weeks or five months. But it certainly isn’t going to last any longer than that.”[4] While all of these seem foolish in hindsight, they came from knowledgeable and intelligent people and were entirely reasonable in their context. And yet, they proved to be fundamentally wrong.
“Frederick North, 2nd Earl of Guilford” painted by Nathaniel Dance-Holland (Wikimedia)
Leaders and strategists would do well to remind themselves of past failures to predict the future, as they are just as fallible as their predecessors and equally susceptible to adopting visions of what is to come that later prove erroneous. Consequently, they should assume a more modest and skeptical approach to future projections and focus more on improving flexibility and critical thinking than correctly predicting what lies around the corner. Doing so offers the best chance to successfully navigate the unforeseen twists ahead.
Unfortunately, while it seems to be a natural tendency of humans to believe they can predict some things about the future, Americans’ faith in the idea of progress can unintentionally give leaders greater confidence in their predictions than those who came before them. The belief that humanity will only increase its collective knowledge and understanding about the world can give the impression that the mistakes of the past were simply due to the ignorance of the age, and that further advancements can enable leaders and strategists today to avoid the errors of their forebears. It is easy to believe that, given all that humanity has discovered and learned, the uncertainty of the future will be one more challenge of the human condition that we will be able to overcome. Interestingly, this is not a new phenomenon—Bernard Brodie noted over 60 years ago how faith in science as a source of progress can produce unwarranted confidence in predictions about the future of war.[5]
The rise of big data analytics is a specific and more recent manifestation of that broader trend. The explosion of information about what has happened can give the illusion that we can predict what will happen, especially since analytics are seemingly able to do so in other venues. However, despite the promise of predictive analytics, researchers are far from able to predict interstate conflict, and no system of early warning has proven to be a reliable tool for policy-making.[6] The most pernicious problem is the fundamental complexity regarding processes of peace and conflict.[7] As two researchers in Science write:
“It is futile to pin one’s hopes of future predictive performance on extrapolations from previous successes in much less complex areas, such as billiards, planetary movements, or traffic systems, or for that matter in simpler political settings such as electoral competition, where both the theoretical principles are well known and events of interest occur with high frequency.”[8]
While analysts can provide insights into local regions or states that may be ripe for violence, it remains impossible to know when the fighting will occur, what will set it in motion, or what course it will take after it begins. Interstate conflict is even more difficult given that it typically encompasses an unwieldy set of actors that act, by definition, in rule-breaking ways.[9] Of course, data analytics may overcome those obstacles one day—it would be contrary to the central ideas of this essay to boldly claim it could not. But in its current state, it should not warrant significant boosts to a leader’s confidence about predictions of the future.
The simple fact is that the future remains unknown and spurns prediction. Although this realization is obvious once stated, leaders and strategists often talk and act as if they can see beyond the horizon. National security discourse is replete with confident declarations about what the next war will be fought over and what it will look like in terms of character and intensity. Those predictions can also appear more inevitable the more effort is devoted to preparing for them. The current dialogue about the possibility of future conflict with China over Taiwan serves as a poignant example. Yet, history suggests the need for more skepticism in strategic thought. In his book Why Nations Go to War, John Stoessinger maintains that leaders often possess significant misperceptions about their adversaries and how wars will unfold prior to hostilities.[10] Bernard Brodie similarly argues that “in wars throughout history, future events have generally proved the pre-hostilities calculations of both sides, victor as well as loser, to have been seriously wrong. ‘Wars…are the graveyards of the predictions concerning them.’”[11] Leaders must remember that all outlooks on future wars are works of imagination, regardless of how informed they are by the present situation or historical data. As Lawrence Freedman notes, “They cannot be anything else because the future is not preordained.”[12]
While leaders and strategists need to be reminded of the hidden nature of the future, it does not mean that they should abandon any attempt to penetrate the fog.
All is not hopeless though. While leaders and strategists need to be reminded of the hidden nature of the future, it does not mean that they should abandon any attempt to penetrate the fog. The future of America’s security requires them to make decisions today about where to invest time, treasure, and talent based on some vision of the future, regardless of how wrong it may be. However, the shrouded character of the future does suggest that leaders should approach it with the understanding that there is a decent chance they will get it wrong. Intellectual humility and a healthy skepticism toward their prophetic abilities should serve as the starting point when approaching decisions about the future. From there, two other broad recommendations follow.
First, there should be a greater emphasis on flexibility—flexibility in strategy, training, and acquisition. As Freedman highlights, the extensive destruction and costs of modern war have led to an overemphasis on the first blow of future wars in hopes of achieving a quick victory. Consequently, strategists have devoted less thought to what comes with the second and third blows, much less to what comes when the war reaches an impasse after years of fighting.[13] While strategists cannot predict what will come after the first blows, they can at least devote more thought to those possibilities and build in elasticity to help them adapt when needed. Robert Jervis wisely advised that instead of pursuing a dominant strategy, “the policy advocate should try to reach the more modest goal of developing policies that have high payoffs if the assumptions about the adversary that underlie them are correct, yet have tolerable costs if these premises are wrong.”[14] Flexibility and resiliency in strategy and planning can help posture forces for the surprises that will inevitably come. Of course, leaders should not neglect other factors in their pursuit of flexibility. They cannot, for example, wholly sacrifice the need to concentrate forces and effort for the sake of increased flexibility. However, the current balance calls for an increased emphasis on the latter.
By creating forces better prepared to operate in the unknown, the military can posture itself for a future full of uncertainty.
The same goes for training. More attention should be devoted to preparing forces to operate in the unanticipated situations. The American military underwent significant training overhauls to make it more realistic in the aftermath of its failures in Vietnam.[15] The Army’s National Training Center, the Navy’s Top Gun, and the Air Force’s Red Flag were all products of a desire to prepare warfighters for the intensity and challenges of war. While those reforms have been crucial toward producing a more capable force, there needs to be an increased focus on adapting to unexpected situations and scenarios. The current approach of practicing against adversary tactics and capabilities that are informed by current intelligence is necessary, but red teams should also attempt to introduce unforeseen tactics and capabilities. Exercises should also avoid shying away from impacts from other domains. For example, they could simulate a network outage at an operations center, a disrupted logistic flow for maintenance, or the loss of a satellite communication capability. By creating forces better prepared to operate in the unknown, the military can posture itself for a future full of uncertainty.
Thankfully, leaders have already begun emphasizing flexibility in acquisitions, though much work remains to be done.[16] Investments in long-term breakthrough technologies are still necessary, but America also needs the ability to rapidly iterate in order to respond to developments in the field as they arise. The wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan have all shown that the United States rarely enters a war with capabilities tailor-made for the fighting it encounters. The defense acquisition system must be able to adapt to those requirements at a quicker pace than its adversaries.
Second, leaders and strategists need to think more seriously about their own thinking. Brodie perceptively noted, “It is characteristic of our convictions, in strategy as in all affairs of life, that we tend to regard them as natural and inevitable.”[17] However, once examined, it becomes clear that the ideas evolved in a traceable way based on experiences, personality, cognitive functions, and context. Leaders and strategists need to consider those influences as they can prove useful in exposing unfounded confidence.
Bernard Brodie Lecturing (Walter Sanders/Life Magazine, 1946)
Some of the influences on thinking come at the level of perception and cognition. Jervis’ seminal work on political psychology brought critical insights about thinking and rationality into the realm of national security. He highlights how an understanding of the influence of cognitive biases as well as the challenges that come from the use of historical analogies can enable leaders to work toward countering the negative impacts of those biases and improve their perceptions and decisions.[18] They can consult with people detached from the issue to ensure they are not becoming trapped by their experiences and position. They can consider how evidence may support multiple explanations and not simply their own, as well as seek out information that could disprove their beliefs.[19] Taking steps to counteract the ways that certain cognitive functions that can lead them astray will not guarantee success, but it can help leaders avoid common traps. If nothing else, thinking through those influences can introduce more humility by reminding leaders of their own fallibility.
Leaders can also use the common distortions that result from those cognitive processes, along with the tendencies of past leaders, as indicators for when more careful thought may be needed. If cognitive functions commonly lead to beliefs that the other side is highly centralized and carefully orchestrates its moves, then leaders should at least pause when they find themselves thinking along those lines.[20] If American leadership tends to underappreciate a nation’s resilience and willingness to fight, as well as its resourcefulness and ability to find allies, perhaps current strategists should make it a point to begin planning from the opposite perspective.[21] If previous generations regularly assumed success would result from some technological advancement, even though technologies are rarely monopolized and adversaries often find ways to limit their effectiveness, then leaders should guard against ideas that suggest complex international conflicts can be solved by a silver bullet. [22] By making the effort to think more seriously about their own thinking, leaders and strategists can work to avoid common missteps and better prepare themselves to capitalize on the surprises that await them.
As much as leaders believe they can discern what is to come, the fact is the future remains unknown. Consequently, they should adopt a posture of humility regarding the future, and devote more time to their own thinking and to the pursuit of flexibility than to guessing correctly about what may come. Doing so will help minimize the impact of surprises and best posture them to pursue American interests whatever the future brings.
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