Gregory R. Copley :
(From previous issue)
T. Irene Sanders, who has devoted her career to contemplating future strategic shapes, noted, in 2006: “[M]ost strategic thinking models, designed to provide us with information about the future, are still based on linear forecasting models and trend extrapolations. They are often too complicated and too disconnected from the dynamics of the big picture context they are designed to navigate.” Despite this, the US Defense Department’s approach to the present crisis in which it finds itself – that is, the prospect of being eclipsed technologically and in terms of doctrine by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in key areas – has been to develop its Long-Range Research & Development Plan (LRRDP), being labeled the “Third Offset”. But it is too limited in its approach; it continues in many ways merely to extrapolate from the existing base; from the legacy force of major capital systems and doctrine.
Part of that shortcoming derives from a national leadership which itself has not articulated a vision for the future, and defense is only one portion of a whole-of-society approach. Even so, the need for a totally new approach is evident.
It must be a maxim of strategic competition that when faced with a strategic momentum which is existentially challenging, then the answer must be to attempt to intercept the future, outflank it; not catch up with an elusive present. And that means comprehending that the future may be one in which social and population patterns, both in one’s own country and the contextual environment, bear little recognition to the current framework.
Indeed, to gain strategic dominance as the world passes through a period of comprehensive reorganization (chaos) should mean thinking of fielding totally new military technology and – more importantly – doctrine, as well as fostering totally new civil technologies and economic models.
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History demonstrates adequately the constant cyclic nature of conflict. Despite this, the world is passing again through a period when the prospect of strategic conflict has been “relegated to history”, except among the aspirant powers, the PRC and Russia. But even those powers have not fully grasped the necessity which will emerge, that strategic success depends on maintaining control over most of the essentials of sovereignty.
Outsourcing of (that is, importing) the essentials of national survival works only until the shooting starts. Significantly, the emerging technology now evident means that “the shooting” may occur incrementally and indirectly, in the form of cyber warfare. Beyond our present move into cyber warfare, we assume that technology will continue to increase progressively over the coming decades.
The era of population decline and economic recalibration seems more than likely to fracture the path of technological progress. It may be that the social and economic context, coupled with the prospective loss of general learning, could dictate that power would move to those with simple and survivable technology and appropriately-matched doctrine.
Certainly, the strategic decline of the West – the “old West”; because “modern civilization” became globally pervasive – was attributable to the terminal exhaustion of a strategy which favored capital investment over maneuver and innovation. When social conditions stagnate, the ability to amass capital declines. Fluid strategic and conflict situations favor innovative thinking, maneuver, and surprise.
Again, this is not the distant future, but the coming two or so decades. Surviving those decades gives the option of dominating the world beyond, with probably a lot fewer people, a totally different economic framework and set of values, and a new palette of technologies, most of them less “networked” than today. The great skill will be to devise strategies and capabilities which will endure and succeed during the coming interregnum of highly-stressed economies. In other words, what tools will succeed to enable success during a period of economic downturn, population dislocation (in psychological as well as movement and numerical terms), and declining access to decisive technologies?
The great fear is to abandon what has worked up to this point, even though it may now be failing, in order to grasp at a new approach. More than ever, it is clear that a successful approach to the future will entail undertaking parallel approaches, developing, perhaps parallel structures, retiring the old as the new succeeds.
How well we perceive and plan for the future determines whether our society will prosper and dominate, or wither and die. It is difficult, especially in times of rising prosperity, to see how this wellbeing could change. But it will. That is the lesson of history.
Before we think about how to approach the future, we have to understand what keeps us locked into our present thinking and habits.
To begin with, our perspectives are constrained by life cycles, and not just our own and the intergenerational frameworks of our families. All life forms have cycles from birth to death. Cultures, societies, and civilizations, like all complex organisms, are no different. Still, it appears that aspects of cultures – which have their origins in the logic of humans to survive in given terrain and climatic conditions – may remain embedded in human DNA. Civilizations, which are quantification-based organizational tools which transcend and are more abstract than cultural tendencies, also mature and die, but even some of their lessons also become embedded in human DNA.
It is part of this survival logic that each human views the world and the future through the prism of his or her own experiences, family and culture, and the terroir relationship which identification with a piece of geography brings. All of these factors have conspired – in the urban, electrified, and wealthy world which emerged during the 20th Century – to narrow, rather than broaden, human perspectives.
The predominant human “culture”, then, has, for more than half the people in the world, become the culture of urbanism. Urban culture is at once both sophisticated in educational and “civilizational” (quantification) terms, and yet narrow in that it has relegated the fundamentals and priority of survival – food production, the gathering of raw materials, and so on – to an unconsciousness. It focuses less on the cycles of climate, generational stewardship and tradition, and food production, and more on the immediate.
Most people see the world, and the future, increasingly in terms defined by this urban cultural and educational focus. Such a narrowness of vision (albeit a different one) would be unsurprising in poorer societies with lower educational levels and a greater rural population, where interaction with divergent ideas would be less frequent. But it has become more pronounced than would have been expected in educated, urban, secular societies. To succeed and prosper, sophisticated and articulate urban groups have generated many rigidly separated parallel paths of significant scientific or technological skills in education and industry. However – outside those skills – urban sophisticates have predominantly succumbed to random pseudo-secular beliefs, built without the same empirical foundations as their professional skills. To oversimplify: Inside their skillsets, vital to urban survival, they understand the empirical logic of progress; outside their narrow skillsets, an articulate ignorance prevails.
This has created a profound schism in Western civilization in particular, leading to a belief that, because of high intellectual capability, skill, and knowledge exists in one side of an individual’s life that this gives credence to beliefs in another side of that individual’s life. This is not new, but it is increasingly a facet of urban thinking, and urban society now comprises some 56 percent of human life.
In turn, this has led, in urban societies, to the attitude that traditional religious beliefs are primitive and risible, whereas secular beliefs are “scientific”. In its extreme form, as recent warfare has shown, this differentiation in bases of social thinking can lead to pseudospeciation: the belief that the “other” society is de facto another species, less than human; less than worthy of equality and respect.
But the reality is that beliefs, whatever the origin, are just that: beliefs. They are not knowledge. Beliefs are, however, a form or derivative of logic which help sustain social cohesion and therefore survival, so they are not unimportant. Indeed, those aspects of belief which contribute to identity security are critical to a sense of worth and purpose, which is the essential driver of societal progress.
As Oswald Spengler hinted in The Decline of the West in 1918, and I stressed in UnCivilization, we have, in fact, moved beyond the Age of Reason, and we have returned to an Age of Belief. Only now, belief is expressed in “non-religious” terms. That, too, has been a long time in coming: becoming stark with the evolution of communism as a pseudo-modern belief system in the 19th Century.
In reality, “secular” belief forms are merely the resonance of urban logic; they are no less culturally- based religions than, say, Christianity, Judaism, or Islam. And, as Elias Canetti pointed out in Crowds & Power, they shape how we retain cohesiveness in societies for survival. Political correctness is the name we give this modern herding instinct, and it keeps us all from straying too far from our group survival, whether in terms of our self-censorship of “loaded” words, or our adherence to physical fashions. We need to know who “we” are, and that is defined largely (and extremely superficially) by how we look, act, and speak, and, critically, where we are.
But all of these belief systems – secular or traditional – keep us in the present, and make difficult any thinking about the future.
How, then, do we understand how patterns emerge which shape our future, at least a century ahead? And how do we plan and implement strategies to ensure our society’s wellbeing when we are enmeshed in social patterns rooted in the immediate, often precluding broad contextual understanding?
(Gregory R. Copley has worked internationally at the highest levels of government advising on strategies to achieve economic and political success. He is the founder and editor of the Global Information System intelligence service used by governments, and the Defense & Foreign Affairs series of publications, including the Defense & Foreign Affairs Handbook, hailed as “indispensable” by President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor, William Clark; and author of thousands of articles, classified papers, speeches, and books on strategy, defense, and aviation. He lives in Washington, D.C.)
(Concluded)
