Predicting Future War

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 T history, changes in the character of war have been difficult for contemporaries to identify, particularly during long 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 Håvard Hegre, specifically that war, both minor and major, is in decline.4 Statistical work 1 Robert D. Kaplan, “The Coming Anarchy,” The Atlantic, February 1994, http://www.theatlantic.com/ideastour/archive/kaplan.mhtml; Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992); Samuel B. Huntington, Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996); David Kilcullen, Out of the Mountains (London: