Threat prediction fails, in part, because the process is done today using methodologies inherited from the Cold War and hardwired into a bureaucratic process that virtually guarantees failure at every turn. These methodologies generally divide themselves into five analytical “schools.” The culture that spawned each school shapes the nature of the inquiry. The sum of the processes practiced by these schools exerts a subtle influence that inevitably identifies future threats more like the enemies we want to fight than the enemies we have fought consistently since the end of World War II.
The “Scenario Development School” is the fastest-growing cottage industry inside Beltway think tanks. Threat prediction using “scenarios” involves a process as simple as it is deceiving. Pick one of the usual suspects with serious military capabilities who sits athwart a piece of ground of strategic importance to the United States and then encourage the stimulation of excuses for going to war with him. Since the end of the Cold War, the list of usual suspects has been monotonously consistent: China, Iran, and North Korea (with, in the background, Russia as the nostalgic favorite). Again, the problem with the scenario approach has been that, try as the pundits might (and they really try—particularly at budget time), they have not been able to elevate the overt intentions of these actors to a level approaching imminent danger.
The “Emerging Technology School” consists of frightened and well-remunerated techno-warriors who constantly scan the threat horizon anxious to alert the security community to enemies who they sense are harnessing the diabolical genius of homegrown weapon makers. To be sure, we must guard against being surprised by leap-ahead technologies in the hands of an enemy, particularly enemies who pursue nuclear weapons technologies. But too often, the technological fear mongering has led to a “Chicken Little” effect that has proven both illusory and very expensive. Technological fear mongering comes from cultural arrogance that assumes our enemies put the same trust in technology that we do. Battlefield experience in the American era strongly suggests that we have been surprised and bested on the battlefield not by superweapons but by enemies who have employed simple technologies creatively. Our combat deaths have been suffered mostly from mortars, mines, and machine guns in Korea and Vietnam and by many of these same weapons adapted to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The “Capabilities-Based Assessment School” seeks to perpetuate the Cold War status quo by accepting the impossibility of predicting the threat. The capabilities approach argues for flexibility as the safest means for dealing with the ambiguity of today’s conflict environment. Security comes from creating a huge military toolbox from which weapons and forces can be retrieved and tailored to meet unforeseen threats. Adherence to the capabilities school begs the question: How can we justify spending fifty billion on a predictive process so ineffective that it abrogates the very purpose of its existence?
The “New Concepts Masquerading as Strategy School” is my personal favorite. Futurists inside the Beltway frequently fall victim to a new idea expressed as a “war-fighting concept.” Remember “shock and awe”? This concept grew out of our victory in Desert Storm. It was premised on the ridiculous idea that U.S. killing technologies would prevail against any enemy. Fear of precision bombing would strike at the psyche of a cowering foe. He would be awed and shocked enough to give up after an overwhelming demonstration of U.S. precision firepower. Of course, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and ISIS have long put paid to this idea. But sadly, it continues to seduce and spawn other firepower-centered silliness. Take the concept of net-centric warfare, for instance. In the nineties, senior naval officers predicted that our ability to dominate the network would “lift the fog of war” and allow us to see, strike, and kill any enemy from the air. Again, no one in Washington talked to the Chinese and North Vietnamese about this beforehand. Other silliness followed 9/11. The concept of “effects-based operations” (EBO) was the brainchild of Air Force senior officers. The geniuses behind EBO postulated that winning could be guaranteed by simply selecting the proper bombing targets. Build an air campaign based on the desired “effect,” bomb it, and we win. The latest embodiment of ridiculous firepower concepts is another Navy stroke of genius termed “AirSea Battle.” The concept is a thinly veiled battle plan for defeating the Chinese from the sea. More on AirSea Battle, and what the Chinese think of it, below.
The “Global Trends School” is the most insidious of these schools, because it has been given legitimacy by the Obama administration. In fact, the president and his defense intellectuals contend that climate change is more of a danger to national security than ISIS. This approach seeks to launder politically and socially popular global concerns into future military threats. The global trends movement started to gain adherents after the fall of the Soviet Union, when the intelligence community went looking for alternative avenues to justify post–Cold War weapons and structures. The most fashionable include diminishing global water supplies, urbanization, and the AIDS/HIV epidemic. But the current favorite inside the Beltway is climate change. In fact, at the 2015 Climate Change Summit in Paris, President Obama carried the war against climate change forward by claiming that rising global temperatures actually cause wars. While scientists agree on the dangers of global warming, I have yet to find any respected social scientist who makes a causal connection between air temperature and war.
So where does the administration get its facts about climate change and war? First, it contends that a warming planet causes drought, which leads to mass migration away from areas of creeping desertification. To be sure, rising temperatures combined with overgrazing in places like central Africa have caused displacement of peoples. Yet the misery of these peoples leads to, well, misery—not war. Tribes striving to exist have little energy left over to declare war against neighbors. Central Africa is in the grip of often-horrific conflicts, started by Boko Haram in Nigeria and Al Shabaab in Somalia. But these terrorists are motivated by “the usual suspects,” like religious hatred, centuries-long tribal animosities, and political greed.
One source for connecting war to temperature comes from the political closeness between environmentalists and the antiwar movement. Their logic goes like this: “Global warming is bad. Wars are bad. Therefore they must be connected.” Remember, prior to the 1991 Gulf War, environmentalists warned of a decade of global cooling that would come from burning Kuwaiti oil fields, which did not happen. More recently, environmental radicals argued against bombing ISIS oil trucks, fearing the environmental consequences. Again, this did not happen.
In fact, environmental activism aside, the three-thousand-year historical record of human conflict argues conclusively against any causal relationship between war and temperature. Let me be more specific. Never in the written history of warfare, from Megiddo in 1,500 BC to the Syrian civil war today, is there any evidence that wars are caused by warmer air.
I really do not care about the administration’s attempted connection between war and climate change; it is certain that many American people do not care either. My real concern is that the administration might translate this into a deflection of resources away from fighting a war against global terrorists to a contrived war against global warming. That would cause real harm to our Soldiers, who are trying to win a real war.
There is nothing wrong with the defense intellectual community cranking out concepts, even the patently ridiculous ones cited above. The problem comes when silly ideas become strategies. It begins with a chorus of ahistorical acolytes who preach so loudly that a concept becomes an office in the Pentagon. Soon, the general or admiral in charge of the concept starts to lobby the administration, Congress, and the media. Shortly thereafter, lines in the defense budget appear, and careers