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The future of warfare: Are we ready?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2016

Randolph Kent
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Abstract

To what extent do the ways in which we anticipate threats, analyze their possible consequences and determine ways to mitigate them explain the causes of warfare in the future? This article – though never attempting to predict – poses plausible causes of future wars that may stem from transformative change over the next two decades. In asking the question “Are we ready?” to deal with such wars, the answer is framed in terms of the interrelationship between the prospect of profound change, emerging tensions, unprecedented violence and organizational capacities to deal with complexity and uncertainty. To be prepared to deal with the prospect of future wars, relevant organizations have to be more anticipatory and adaptive, while at the same time looking for new ways to engage the wider international community. The article concludes with a set of recommendations intended to meet such organizational challenges – with the aspiration that the question “Are we ready?” can be answered more affirmatively in the future.

Keywords

atomized societiescyberspacecyber-wardynamic displacement continuumouter spaceresource conflictprivate sectororganizational behaviourslumscapestransformative change
Type
Looking into the future
Information
International Review of the Red Cross , Volume 97 , Issue 900: The evolution of warfare , December 2015 , pp. 1341 - 1378
Copyright
Copyright © icrc 2016 

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36 The UK government's National Space Policy notes that “space has become increasingly important to modern Britain. This trend is set to continue as societies in the developed and developing worlds rely increasingly on space based assets as one of the critical infrastructures to meet the needs of an estimated population of 9 billion in 2050. Satellites will assist with better management of scarce resources, offer improved communications and support more efficient use of energy. Our global space assets are rightly recognized as part of our critical national infrastructure, and space weather is included in our national risk assessment, acknowledging the risk it represents to both space and ground-based facilities. Once the domain of only those who understood rocket science, space is now a leveller of society in developed and developing countries.” Government of the United Kingdom, National Space Policy, available at: https:// www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/484865/NSP_-_Final.pdf.

37 Cyber-cash – an expansion of the “bitcoin” concept – reflects an interesting example of the tension between State authority, States’ institutional adaptiveness and the unconstrained independence of alternative networks. A bitcoin, the most basic component of one form of cyber-cash, has been described as nothing more than a unique string of numbers, not tied to any real-world currency. Its strength and value come from the fact that people believe in it and use it. “Anyone can download a bitcoin wallet on to their computer, buy bitcoins with traditional currency from a currency exchange, and use them to buy or sell a growing number of products or services as easily as sending an e-mail. Transactions are secure, fast and free, with no central authority controlling value or supply, and no middleman taking a slice.” Jamie Bartlett, The Dark Net: Inside the Digital Underworld, Melville House, Brooklyn, 2015, p. 74.

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39 National Intelligence Council (NIC), Global Strategic Trends, draft, March 2015.

40 “[L]et's forget about trying to get the planet's nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool's errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism. By minilateralism, I mean a smarter, more targeted approach: We should bring to the table the smallest possible number of countries needed to have the largest possible impact on solving a particular problem. Think of this as minilateralism's magic number.” Moises Naim, “Minilateralism: The Magic Number to Get Real International Action”, Foreign Policy, 21 June 2009.

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42 In this context, the president of the United States, Barack Obama, referred to the growing gap between rich and poor in the United Sates in his January 2016 State of the Union address.

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48 68th General Assembly, First Committee, 17th Meeting, 5 October 2013.

49 A European intelligence official as quoted in Sam Jones, “Satellite Wars: A New Arms Race Threatens Security in Space”, Financial Times, 21/22 November 2015.

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59 The complex admix of refugee populations in the future has already been suggested by US NATO Commander General Phillip Breedlove, when he noted that “ISIS is spreading like cancer among refugees”. Alan Yuhus, “NATO Commander: ISIS ‘Spreading like Cancer’ Among Refugees”, The Guardian, 1 March 2016. Certainly, since Rwandan refugees were encamped in Zaire, criminals in refugee camps had become a recognized phenomenon, and criminals as well as radical opposition groups had a wide range of conventional weapons. Ever easier access to more sophisticated and lethal weapons may well mean that radical opposition groups and criminal elements in the refugee camps of the future will also have access to more sophisticated weaponry. See, for example, British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), “The Terror Trader”, documentary, Episode 5 in the series Nuclear Secrets, 2007.

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61 D. R. Ward, above note 20, p. 5. According to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, “The United States is reliant on space for virtually every essential security mission, but US space capacities have not kept up with rapid global changes.”

62 NIC, above note 39.

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65 Ibid .

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67 John Arquilla, “Rods from God: Imagine a Bundle of Telephone Poles Hurtling through Space at 7,000 mph”, SF Gate, 12 March 2006, available at: www.sfgate.com/opiion/article/RODS-FROM-GOD-Imagine-a-bundle-of-telephone-2539690.php.

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73 Ibid .

74 Examples for the challenges of dam building along the Brahmaputra can be found in China Dialogue, Hazard Research Centre, University College London, and Humanitarian Futures Programme, King's College, London, The Waters of the Third Pole: Sources of Threats; Sources of Survival, June 2010, available at: www.humanitarianfutures.org/publications/the-waters-of-the-third-pole-sources-of-threat-sources-of-survival/. For the Mekong delta, see “Requiem for a River”, The Economist, 13 February 2016, p. 47.

75 The tenor of the debate can be seen from two examples: a more peaceful resolution in Sudha Ramachandrum, “Water Wars: China, India and the Great Dam Rush”, The Diplomat, 3 April 2015, available at: http://thediplomat.com/2015/04/water-wars-china-india-and-the-great-dam-rush/; and a more pessimistic view in Joel Wuthnow, “This River Could Sink China–India Relations”, The National Interest, 19 April 2016, available at: http://nationalinterest.org/feature/water-war-river-could-sink-china-india-relations-15829.

76 US Department of Defense, 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Road Map, 13 October 2014.

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78 This statement was made in response by a member of the Africom Team to this author's question during the Southern Africa Development Community workshop.

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80 See European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control, “Zika Virus Infection”, available at: http://ecdc.europa.eu/en/healthtopics/zika_virus_infection/Pages/index.aspx#sthash.I0I8ZVNx.dpuf.

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84 Teal organizations are based upon the ability of an organization's staff to self-organize and self-manage in order to achieve the overall purpose of the organization. Rather than a hierarchical “plan and control” structure, the Teal structure consists of small teams that determine how best the team can achieve abiding organizational goals and how best individual team members can do so. It is a structure marked by its fluidity and adaptive capacities. The concept of the Teal organization can be found in Frederick Laloux, Reinventing Organisations: A Guide to Creating Organisations Inspired by the Next Stage of Human Consciousness, Nelson Parker Publishers, Brussels, 2014.

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86 Some of these sorts of concerns were mirrored in the UK's Iraq Inquiry report, referred to as the Chilcot Report, concerning decisions which led to the invasion of Iraq and subsequent post-war action. The report was presented on 6 July 2016. Committee of Privy Counsellors, The Report of the Iraq Inquiry, report, HC 264, 6 July 2016.

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88 In this context, Professor Martin Rees quotes the long-time scientific adviser to the UK government, Solly Zuckerman, saying that “the basic reason for the irrationality of the whole process [of the arms race] … was shaped by technologists, not because they were concerned with any visionary picture of how the world should evolve, but because they were merely doing what they saw to be their job”. Rees, Martin, Our Final Century: Will the Human Race Survive the 21st Century?, Basic Books, London, 2003, p. 32Google Scholar.

89 Iana Dreyer and Gerald Stang, “Foresight in Governments – Practices and Trends around the World”, Yearbook of European Security, 2013.

90 William J. Perry, My Journey at the Nuclear Brink, Stanford Securities Studies, 2016, as quoted in Jerry Brown, “A Stark Nuclear Warning”, New York Review of Books, 14 July 2016, p. 11.

91 See Simon, Herbert, “Rational Decision-Making in Business Organizations”, American Economic Review, Vol. 69, No. 4, 1979 Google Scholar. In the article, Simon describes the dimensions of “bounded rationality”, where individuals make rational decisions, though limited by the available information, the tractability of the decision problem, the cognitive limitations of their minds, and the time available to make the decision.

92 Nik Gowing and Chris Langdon, Thinking the Unthinkable: A New Imperative for Leadership in the Digital Age, Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, London, 2016, p. 10.

93 Ibid .

94 In a 2015 report on The Future of Global Conflict: Trends and Challenges towards 2040, it was noted that “large state organisations and the international community have co-opted the language of critique, creativity and innovation without fundamentally altering their organisational logic”. Wilton Park Report WP 1374, in association with the UK Ministry of Defence and the Department for International Development, 18 February 2015.

95 Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathan Woetzel, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends, Public Affairs Books, New York, 2015.

96 A case in point were the parliamentary debates in the United Kingdom over the period of 2015–2016 concerning the renewal of the submarine-based Trident nuclear system. While the debates in Parliament and throughout much of Whitehall had immediate political and economic interests for various constituencies, it was a debate that nevertheless was about a system that would take twenty years to finalize, and one which in twenty years would be readily surpassed, for example, by extraterrestrial capacities.

97 Riel Miller, “Futures Literacy – Embracing Complexity and Using the Future”, Ethos, No. 10, October 2011, p. 25.

98 F. Laloux, above note 84.

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100 Wouter Aghina, Aaron De Smet and Suzanne Haywood, “The Past and the Future of Global Organizations”, McKinsey Quarterly, September 2014.

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102 See, for example, Allison, Graham and Zelikow, Philip, Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis, 2nd ed., Longman, New York, 1999 Google Scholar; and S. McChrystal, above note 85.

103 Wilton Park, above note 94.

104 Robert H. Waterman Jr. defined adhocracy as “any form of organization that cuts across normal bureaucratic lines to capture opportunities, solve problems, and get results”. For Henry Mintzberg, an adhocracy is a complex and dynamic organizational form. It is different from bureaucracy; like Alvin Toffler in Future Shock, Mintzberg considers bureaucracy a thing of the past, and adhocracy one of the future. Adhocracy is “very good at problem solving and innovations, and thrives in a changing environment. It requires sophisticated and often automated technical systems to develop and thrive.” See the definition of “Adhocracy” on Wikipedia, available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adhocracy.

105 Ben Hecht, “Collaboration is the New Competition”, Harvard Business Review, 10 January 2013. In a related context, a former chair of the British Standards Institute's Knowledge Management Statistics Committee, Ron Young, noted in a presentation concerning “Competitive Collaboration in a Global Knowledge Economy” (Abu Dhabi, 15–16 March 2011) that the real purpose of a European Commission-initiated project across European companies was not “the deliverables”, but was rather to set up projects to get organizations in different countries across Europe to collaborate. “We learned so much from this EC project about the power of effective virtual cross functional collaborative team work.”

106 M. Beard, above note 50. Emphasis added.

107 Ibid .

108 See “Extrajudicial Killing and Drones” in ‘Drone Strikes and International Law: Fallout Reaches the Ivory Tower”, The Economist, 22 April 2015. See also Peter Maurer interview, ‘‘The Use of Armed Drones Must Comply with Laws”, ICRC, 10 May 2013, available at: www.icrc.org/eng/resources/documents/interview/2013/05-10-drone-weapons-ihl.htm.

109 Mulgan, Geoff, The Art of Public Strategy: Mobilizing Power and Knowledge for the Common Good, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2009, p. 56Google Scholar.

110 Joyner, Christopher, International Law in the 21st Century: Rules for Global Governance, Rowman & Littlefield, New York, 2005, p. 119Google Scholar.

111 “A mess is a system or complex and dynamically interacting web of ill-defined or wicked problems, conundrums, paradoxes, puzzles, crises and their solutions, as well as the stated and understated, conscious and unconscious assumptions, beliefs, emotions and values that underlie these problems and solutions.” Alpaslan, Can M. and Mitroff, Ian I., Swans, Swine, and Swindlers: Coping with the Growing Threat of Mega-crises and Mega-messes, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 2008, p. 169Google Scholar.

112 Wilton Park, above note 94.

113 See, for example, Sloterdijk, Peter, Terror from the Air, trans. Patton, Amy and Corcoran, Steve, MIT Press, Cambridge, 2009 Google Scholar.

114 Mercer, David, Future Revolutions: A Comprehensive Guide to Life and Work in the Next Millennium, Orion Business Books, London, 1998, pp. 172 ffGoogle Scholar.

115 Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business, John Murray, London, 2013, p. 7.

116 D. Mercer, above note 114.

117 Additional examples can be found in Roger Bourke White Jr, Visions of 2050: Rise of the Cyber Muses, Author House, Bloomington, 2015.