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 are made. The conceptual gurus retire and get good jobs with Lockheed Martin, Boeing, or General Dynamics. Weapons platforms (ships, planes, and missiles) suddenly become perfect instruments for fulfilling the requirements demanded by net-centric, effects-based, or AirSea Battle concepts, and a trillion dollars of your money goes down the drain. Sadly, the consequences are not just wasted money. Every dollar wasted on trillion-dollar gizmos is a dollar taken away from those who actually fight our wars. I find it discouraging that in our recent history, few concepts have emerged from Beltway gurus that advocate for the Soldiers and Marines who engage daily in the bloody business of close combat. There’s just no money in that.
WHOM WILL WE FIGHT?
Instead of betting the future on failed conceptual approaches, consider the value of a new approach that exploits contemporary history and human behavior as components of a way to see into the future. Too often, generals are accused of trying to “fight the next war like the last.” I suggest that much of our failure to anticipate the future properly rests on the fact that generals fail to look closely at the past, particularly the history and past behaviors of our enemies. Since the end of World War II, the generals have gotten it more wrong than right by ignoring “last wars.” President Eisenhower’s New Look sought to replace conventional with strategic forces, and the nation went to war in Vietnam woefully underresourced for a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaign. We paid a similar price in 2003, when U.S. command delayed too long in applying the lessons of Vietnam to the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, in today’s Beltway, culture, history, and behavior are neither studied nor understood adequately. Thus, touting the past as a reliable road map for the future is a tough sell.
The power of an historical-behavioral approach comes from the realization that regardless of region, actor, motive, geopolitical circumstances, intensity, or type of conflict, our enemies have consistently repeated behaviors that they believe offer the greatest chance of success against us in battle. Patterns of behavior wind their way through all of our contemporary wars and are repeated at all levels of war, from strategic to tactical.
Lately, the historical-behavioral approach to future-casting has gained serious intellectual reinforcement within the social sciences. The Nobel Prize–winning research of economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reveals how humans behave when they make serious decisions in life. Many of these decisions are made less from logic and data than from the psychology of personal biases and past behaviors and experiences. Phillip Tetlock, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania (and a colleague of mine), takes Kahneman a step further in his book Superforecasting.1 Kahneman concludes that even the most powerful and politically savvy fall victim to what he terms “scope insensitivity.” Every human being, no matter how connected with the outside world, eventually gets to a point where there is nothing more in his understanding of the political environment. Tetlock uses the term “WYSIATI,” or “What you see is all there is,” to describe the phenomenon of scope insensitivity. In other words, human behavior derives only from what the person sees. Scope insensitivity explains why leaders choose to go to war in circumstances doomed to failure. To someone outside the inner circle, the leader might be totally nuts, as well as dangerous. But the leader acts only on what he sees, on the basis of his perception of the realities of the world. Thus, behavior driven by experiences in dealing with the outside world might just be the most powerful single indicator for forecasting the future decisions of global leaders and the course of world events.
Everyman’s scope insensitivity is different from the insensitivity of those who start wars. Everyman is powerless. But leaders who control militaries and populations have the power to act and be destructively swayed by their social insensitivity. The difference lies in an old war-college equation: “threat equals capability times will.” An example: in his heyday, Fidel Castro would have reveled in the military defeat of the United States. His scope insensitivity was formed from a wacky Caribbean version
