Book Description

This book is written to provide decisionmakers, policymakers, long-range planners, and others interested in the future a means to compare the consequences of their actions taken today to plausible, future alternative world environments or scenarios. Earlier work by the author has provided the four basic scenarios which are easily monitored for updating. Scenario updating is a task that is advisable at least every 5 years to maintain the usefulness of the scenarios. The text presented here describes the processes and methods for the creation of alternative scenarios and the use of the Cone of Plausibility (described in Creating Strategic Visions, Taylor, 1990) to project the scenarios 10 to 30 years or more into the future. The text also supports and is based on the following two previous writings of the author, Alternative World Scenarios for Strategic Planning (Taylor, 1988 and 1990) and A World 2010: A New Order of Nations (Taylor, 1992). Changing trends and the occurrences of associated events (e.g., the demise of the Soviet Union and decline of Soviet communism; the rise of democratic governments; environmental pollution), especially during the last two decades of the 20th century, have created a new era of forced transition for the world's modernized industrial nations. For example, the military of the United States and its defense-oriented industries have been recast into a reformation of conflict/war based strategies to conflict/peace-based strategies. The military is faced with a forced transition from warfighting missions to missions of peace maintenance: peace-enforcement, making, -keeping, and -building. Military leaders who view security and defense as an integral part of a strong, but peaceful, economic, and political infrastructure sustained by superior national military strategies increasingly will dominate the U.S. defense rhetoric. Most industries of the military industrial complex that are or will be retooling in the late 1990s from defense production to that of domestic, almost certainly will meet the expected demands of the largely peace driven national and global economies of the future.