Predicting the future of warfare: why bother?

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSEWATCH

The Army officially has given up on trying to predict the future.

And it has good reasons for doing so. After the Cold War, large, heavily armored armies were regarded as passe and U.S. military strategy called for smaller, high-tech, "agile" forces that could quickly deploy, kill the bad guys and go home within 30 days. Planning for those surgical wars did not pay off for the Army when it was sent to Iraq and its undefended supply lines became prime targets of insurgent bombs.

Let down by the hype of technowarfare and wised up by the harshness of counterinsurgencies, the Army is not about to make grandiose jumps into the future. Its draft "operational concept" for how it envisions fighting wars from 2016 to 2028 in fact reads more like a how-to manual for winning Iraq and Afghanistan-like campaigns than a vision of warfare decades from now.

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The document--a brainchild of Brig. Gen. H.R. McMaster, who's a senior advisor to Gen. David Petraeus--for the first time institutionalizes the idea that technology is not to be trusted and commits into doctrine the lessons from the current wars. It calls for a flatter command structure and for greater integration of military and civilian organizations. It also takes a dim view of the future in that the erosion of America's financial strength will influence military strategy and that potential enemies, like roadside bombers, will employ technologies in ways that could give them an edge over U.S. forces.

There are no symptoms of "next-war-itis" in this document.

"We are trying to avoid the mistakes of the past," says one of the writers of the operational concept, Lt. Col. Mark Elfendahl, chief of joint and Army concepts at the Army Capabilities Integration Center, Fort Monroe, Va.

"We're avoiding one of the drawbacks of our earlier approach to concepts: looking too far into the future and becoming disconnected from what's going on right now," Elfendahl says. "Now we are trying to bring the future closer to us and look at a shorter range of time."

Taking a short-term view is not a bad idea after having been blindsided by 9/11 and al-Qaida. But it does offend many traditionalists who contend this approach to war planning is myopic and could leave the Army ill-equipped to tackle problems that it now cannot prognosticate.

A retired general who specializes in doctrine development says the new operational concept is testament to an overreaction to Defense Secretary Robert Gates' call to...