Book Description

The best way to think about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) comes from a statement often heard in business strategic planning circles: It is easier to design the future than it is to predict it. To think about a revolution in military affairs as a predictive problem misses many of the most important parts of such an exercise. The responsibility of the national security community is to consider the impact of such a development precisely because it is a national security community. Other nations may move in this direction, and if ours does not, some extremely serious imbalances could follow. Although the end of the cold war is recognized by all, and although the unique conditions of the Gulf War are understood not to characterize all future U.S. conflicts, a considerable gap exists between saying these things and actually absorbing them into our institutions. This conference is about taking a step in this institutional redirection: making the change from talking about revolutionary change to having it influence the Army's day-to-day actions. In an article published a few months ago I argued that current thinking about national security was too constrained by immediate issues. Downsizing of force structure, budget reductions, Bosnia, and other issues were all very real problems requiring a great deal of leadership and management to properly deal with them.1 But there was a subconscious tendency to use these immediate issues as signposts of the future, even though little evidence existed to support such a use. From many years of experience in long-range planning at the Hudson Institute came some difficult lessons learned. The hardest single feature in conducting long-range planning and brainstorming sessions for both government and private sector clients was to divorce oneself from current conditions. In the 1960s, for example, a great many planning studies were built around a continuation of the `youth revolution' of that decade, the introduction of new lifestyles, tastes, and social norms. In the 1970s many planning studies were premised around various solutions and outcomes to the energy crisis. By then the youth movement had been forgotten, just as in the 1980s the energy crisis had been forgotten. With the end of the cold war it is understandable that immediate issues would be analyzed as future signposts. In the absence of other guidance there is not much else on which to base planning. But if anything seems certain it is that in not too many years a new equilibrium in U.S. military spending will be established, the situation in Bosnia will be accepted, and that new dangers will loom on the nation's horizon. Yet another aspect of change needs to be emphasized: the inability of people who have been involved in a field for most of their careers to preserve their capacity to be intellectually surprised. A tendency exists in large organizations for members to see the world in terms of an unsurprising repetition of bureaucratic turf grabs, interdepartmental feuds, and self-serving individual behavior. Economist A.O. Hirschman has written that in the field of Latin American economic development too many experts have been unable to see the dramatic changes that have taken place. Instead, they see an out-of-date world defined by government incompetence, civil-military tensions, and technological backwardness. While these exist, important transformations have occurred in political and economic structures, capital markets, and civil control of the military. If the U.S. Army must maintain one attitude, it is the capacity to accept new ideas and patterns of thinking.