But we cannot simply wish for a peaceful, stable world and hope to achieve it. If I have learned anything in more than thirty years as a soldier, it is that the price of stability is diligence and military readiness. This will become increasingly true as the major revolutions currently underway accelerate and political and military events play out in unexpected ways.
The Information Revolution has become so ubiquitous that many of us forget its recent advent. Today, there are just over 200 million computers in America. In four years, the number of computers in the world will be rising toward one billion. By the year 2025, computers will operate incalculably faster than they do today. Wireless, global satellite computer networking will become commonplace. This inexpensive universal interconnectivity will have many positive effects. But what technology empowers, it can also destabilize. For example, a religious zealot in a hopelessly poor corner of some wretched country might be motivated by the information he receives through this high-tech window to simultaneously reject “sinful” technology for his own followers, while using its communication channels to obtain weapons and conduct unconventional combat that destabilizes his already feeble national government.
While information technology continues to make national borders transparent, its presence might harden cultural barriers, especially in countries such as Iran, Libya, Sudan, and Afghanistan, which already feel assailed by outside influences. Equally, the intrusion of foreign values can foment conflict in parts of the world where systems of social organization are breaking down and people seek new equilibrium. While this is often an exciting process, it can also be chaotic, and occasionally violent. The current situation in Indonesia and social instability in parts of Latin America reflect this phenomenon.
Finally, as the United States continues to be the dominant force in the popular culture disseminated over the global information network, people of many nations will react negatively to the dazzling (albeit distorted) glimpses of our culture and lifestyle. The already serious problem of illegal migration might be exacerbated. And for those unable to migrate, a reaction of bitterness based on envy might engender widespread hatred of the United States that can easily be exploited by nationalistic leaders. There is the potential for this problem in vast areas of overpopulated Asia.
The Socio-Biological Revolution that began with the control of human fertility and the widespread entry of women into the workplace in the 1960s in America will continue to accelerate in the twenty-first century. This revolution will evolve with major changes in the nature of work. Manufacturing will be relentlessly displaced by Information Age occupations. By 2025, over 95 percent of work in America and other advanced nations will involve some use of information technology in direct or embedded forms. The silicon chip—or its photon successor—will become as ubiquitous as the nut and bolt of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Workers in the advanced countries will be compelled to work in smarter ways; our workforces will include more women with children and more seniors, who will take advantage of the demographic shift of our aging population. But education, not manual strength, will be the key to workers' success.
This transformation will prove disquieting, however, to those nations that rely on muscle power and fail to educate their people for the new age. Again, the potential for resentment of the poor toward the rich will only increase.
The Efficiency Revolution is often overshadowed by the Information Revolution, to which it is linked. The fact is that not every society or culture can exploit the Information Age efficiently. American culture, in which men and women increasingly share responsibility, is particularly and peculiarly geared to efficiency. The Wall Street adage “What's the bottom line?” has become our twenty-first-century mantra. The Europeans and Japanese often see this as a cold-hearted, indeed ruthless, form of capitalism. But, while there are psychological costs, in general our focus on efficiency has enabled us to generate more wealth for more people in less time than ever before. Productivity is the most important factor resulting from efficiency. This productivity has been possible through fuller participation in education throughout virtually every sector of the workforce. We don't offer the false promise of lifelong work made to the Japanese after World War II, or ultralucrative automatic social benefits the European working class enjoys. But the American worker is educated to perform a variety of increasingly complex assignments that develop as the Information Age progresses.
The transformation of military forces is best known to the public through the employment of “precision” munitions, usually displayed in armed service–provided (and edited) video clips shown on the news media. Those exciting videos are only part of the story. The fact is that the transformation has made profound changes, not only in the technological realm, but also in the area of human behavior in our military. As in the Information and Efficiency Revolutions, sheer kinetic strength is no longer necessary for lethality. Without question, the U.S. Army and its sister services can dominate any battlefield both today and into the foreseeable future, thanks in large measure to this revolution.
But I am also concerned that this transformation could prove to be largely irrelevant. That was one of the most sobering lessons my analysts took from the projection of the Army's future challenges. Most analysts predicted that no “peer” competitors, such as Russia or China, would arise to challenge us on an equal footing for the next fifteen to twenty-five years, if then. And neither of those nations will have the same dynamic mix of conventional and strategic, ground, air, and sea forces that we will enjoy far into the future. So the United States is likely to remain the world's sole superpower with all the challenges and responsibilities that entails.
But what are we likely to do with this power? Unless Russia rebuilds its Air Force and China modernizes its own, large-scale aerial combat does not seem to be in the offing. Nor will there be large surface fleet battles. Instead the future threat the United States faces will most likely involve intertwined elements of the evolving revolutions acted out on unpredictable battlefields with nontraditional foes. This being the case, our undisputed superiority in technology might do us little good, and, indeed, might lure us into a false sense of invulnerability.
Who might these future threats be? DCSINT analysts predicted they would include warlords, tribal chiefs, drug traffickers, international criminal cartels, terrorists, and cyber-bandits. And, just to up the ante, we might have to engage many or all of these characters simultaneously, while also playing a major role in humanitarian emergencies. Conventional warfare involving our Legacy and Interim Forces might also be a possibility, especially in regional conflicts that could flare up again in the Balkans and the former republics of the Soviet Union. All of these contingencies might be exacerbated by the pressures of growing populations, the global spread of “mega-cities,” and unprecedented diasporas of people fleeing conflict, economic chaos, and the breakdown of order in failed states. Significantly, the proportion of refugees and internally displaced persons has outpaced overall population growth since the 1960s.
With the ongoing transformation of the American armed forces, no conventional military could ever defeat us. But the primary challenges may well come from those who are ruthless in the “asymmetric” use of violence. For example, a single terrorist truck bomb inflicted terrible casualties on the Americans in the Khobar Towers barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, and drove the entire U.S. Air Force contingent from that base to an isolated airfield in the central Saudi desert. A few years later, the alleged mastermind of that attack, Saudi exile Osama bin Laden, purportedly ordered the attack on two U.S. embassies in East Africa, which killed 224 people, including twelve Americans. And last year, the Navy destroyer USS Cole was attacked in the Yemen port of Aden by suicide bombers, who killed seventeen American sailors. American and Yemeni officials have charged that bin Laden ordered this attack as well.
But the Saudi terrorist remains at large, reportedly guiding his organization, al Qaeda (“the Base”), fro
m a sanctuary in Afghanistan. Although the Clinton administration attacked bin Laden's Afghan base with cruise missiles following the 1998 embassy bombings, his hideout was never raided by highly trained U.S. Special Operations Forces, in part due to international political considerations and concerns about sovereignty. Such concerns will extend indefinitely into the future as terrorists continue to test our resolve and inflict damage when and where they can.
As we have already seen in conflicts in countries such as Congo and Sierra Leone, tribal warriors go into battle with cell phones and target their rockets with GPS satellite receivers linked to laptop computers. This trend will only continue. The nearly universal Soviet Bloc Kalashnikov will give way to sophisticated sniper rifles with night-vision scopes and advanced shoulder-fired antiaircraft missiles. Warlords will trade commodities such as diamonds or drugs for such ordnance. Within decades, these people could face off in combat armed with virulent chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction. These are the grim realities for which the Army is now preparing today.
How might some of these conflicts evolve?
Suppose there is a sprawling mega-city in 2025, population 20 million and growing, the capital of a developing country where civil control has completely broken down. Although rich in resources, this nation is a failed state, and warring factions struggle for control over this shantytown metropolis. Already jammed beyond the capacity of its infrastructure, the city is flooded by millions of refugees fleeing battles in the countryside. Starvation and epidemic disease add to the collective misery.
The competing warlords are themselves astute and well protected, with easy access to human source intelligence on their rivals and on the small contingent of international peacekeepers trying vainly to stop the bloodshed. When forced to communicate electronically, the warlords use obscure tribal dialects unfamiliar to foreign intelligence interpreters listening to voice intercepts in orbiting aircraft. The warlords ruthlessly use the local population as human shields and rely for protection from air attack on the thousands of foreign hostages held in squalid hotels and warehouses throughout the city. Relatives of the hostages besiege their governments to save these innocent people. Meanwhile, media-savvy representatives of the warlords promote their causes through global television, while clandestine terrorist forces bomb and kidnap to further these same ends.
There is increasing pressure in the United States for the Pentagon to intervene and use our superpower status to restore order. But how does the U.S. military respond to such a situation?
Another future war scenario involves a small, relatively prosperous country that has had a history of alternating friendship and animosity toward the United States. For the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the country sends thousands of its brightest young men to study computer sciences in American universities. While obtaining their degrees, many of these students also absorb details of our complex economy and analyze its institutional and social vulnerabilities. In about 2025, relations between America and this country again become strained, but not before that country's private sector and government construct multiple channels of access to the most important information networks within the United States. Soon they are using this access to hack information on an unprecedented level. Once the intricate web of America's interconnected computer systems has been analyzed, government and corporate data begins to disappear, banking networks collapse in chaos, telecommunications fail, and then the transportation collapses. With trucking, corporate agriculture, and food and fuel distribution paralyzed, commerce ends. Inevitably, the economy grinds to a halt. Although hundreds of thousands of Americans (mainly the elderly and hospitalized) have died, a debate rages in Washington over whether or not this “nonlethal” information warfare attack warrants a nuclear response.
An additional future threat could involve a would-be regional “hegemon” who diverts considerable natural resource revenue into amassing a huge conventional arsenal, composed mainly of former Soviet weaponry. In 2025, the dictator invades a neighboring state and quickly occupies it.
The United States assembles an intervention force, incorporating ground, air, and naval components. But as the U.S. forces converge on the area, the enemy leadership responds asymmetrically. Foreign hostages are held prisoner in and around important facilities and, before American forces can occupy ports and airfields in nearby friendly countries, the enemy launches ballistic missiles with warheads containing strains of long-lasting anthrax that contaminate these facilities, rendering them unusable for the U.S. force. What is the American response?
In the final scenario the DCSINT staff developed, a major military competitor does indeed arise to challenge us by 2020. Although this nation cannot compete with us on all levels, it can field a certain number of ground divisions as a power projection force; its navy has excellent coastal defense capability; and its strategic missile systems can threaten the United States with nuclear attack. It also has some capability for information warfare to disrupt our computer systems. More importantly, this country has developed a working antiballistic missile system, which, although not perfect, could blunt many of our incoming ICBMs, thus providing some promise of protection to its missile silos.
As 2020 unfolds, this nation ignores American protests and runs roughshod over its perceived sphere of regional influence, seizing offshore islands and oil-rich sections of nearby international water without regard to its neighbors' sovereignty or protests. The United States is faced with a risky and potentially costly conventional war where its opponent will have significant advantages. Further, the United States cannot bully its way through the region under the cover of a nuclear umbrella, since this enemy has a ballistic missile defense and can also strike the U.S. mainland with nuclear missiles of its own. How does America proceed?
As these projections were developed, I did not take pleasure in their disturbing ramifications. Having spent most of my life in uniform during the tense years of the Cold War, I longed for peace, as did my fellow soldiers. But our job wasn't to thrust our heads in the sand. It was to protect our country. And, as the United States prepared its military forces for the future, we had to see the world as it was likely to be, not as we would want it to be.
Most importantly, we had to remember that warfare is first and foremost a human endeavor. Our technical advances have been truly impressive. But the Army and the other services have not reached the point of operating on automatic. The human mind is still the best judgment on the battlefield. The potential for both victory and defeat is present in each of these future war scenarios. Good judgment, courage, decisiveness, and discipline will mean the difference between success and failure. Obviously, weapons will play their part, hopefully the best weapons our soldiers and scientists can develop. But, for the foreseeable future, men and women will be the key factor in controlling those weapons.
Considering the shape of future conflict and the steps that our country must take to respond to it, we need to recognize that the advances in technology will inevitably cause a blurring or melding of the Army's existing branches and Military Occupational Specialties. Further, today's demarcation between the tactical and strategic level will become less sharply delineated. And, finally, the traditionally defined roles of women and men soldiers will change as qualification to accomplish the mission, not gender, becomes the most important criterion the Army considers.
Let's examine how these changes might play out on the future battlefield, as I have defined it in the conflict scenarios.
In the battle involving the ruthless warlords struggling for control of the squalid mega-city by using thousands of foreign hostages as pawns, advanced technology and nontraditional operations might play a critical role. Suppose the most brutal of the warlords, Commander X, decides to leverage his power by beginning the systematic (and globally televised) execution of hostages. But also imagine that the U.S. Army has a small stealth helicopter capable of silently penetrating the airspace Commander X controls in the c
ity and electronically ferreting out his exact location through the use of his unique digital voiceprints forwarded by secure satellite link to a super-computer database on the other side of the world. The helicopter pilot can identify him, no matter what tribal dialect he chooses to employ. Now imagine that this low-flying aircraft is equipped with small “brilliant” munitions that can penetrate roofs or walls and hone in on Commander X's voice before exploding. Finally, let's imagine that the pilot who successfully targets Commander X is a young woman Army captain.
Is she a Military Intelligence officer? Part of the Aviation Branch? A member of our Special Operations Aviation Regiment? Is she operating on the tactical or strategic level? Answer: Her mission encompasses some of all these elements. The important aspect of her assignment is that she accomplishes her mission. Commander X's force is decapitated, the hostages are freed, and the other warlords must accept the fact that they too are equally vulnerable.
Now let's turn to the information warfare scenario. Imagine that America already has teams of highly trained military specialists whose mission is to detect and counter at the lowest level the hostile penetration of vulnerable information systems. When this penetration is detected, the team immediately erects firewalls to protect our country's critical computer networks. Women play vital roles on those teams. Girls and young women are as computer-literate as their male peers. And research indicates that women actually spend more time working or studying online. Women now play essential roles in guarding our country from cyber-attack, and this contribution will only increase. Again, will these soldiers operate at the tactical or strategic level? Will their MOSs be considered “combat” jobs? The distinction is irrelevant if they accomplish their mission.
Women soldiers serving in such revolutionary specialties and assignments would also make extremely valuable contributions to victory in the other two possible future conflict scenarios I have outlined.
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