Lawrence Freedman
People in my strange line of work spend a lot of time considering wars that probably will not happen, or if they do will come about in forms that had not been anticipated and with correspondingly unexpected outcomes. They face the familiar problems that come with trying to predict events that depend on confluences of circumstances. One can never weight the known factors accurately or be sure of their interaction with each other, let alone the unknowns, or account for the eccentric choices made by key players or the chance developments that can affect their calculations.
At any rate many of these expert debates on future wars are not really about prediction. They are more about influencing policy choices, from weapons procurement to diplomatic initiatives. The direst scenarios are drawn up to show what will happen if the wrong choices are made. I explored all this in a book published in 2017 which charted the history of the ‘Future Wars’ literature.
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