Defense and epochal change

More and more defence organizations claim that the future security environment within which ‘armed forces’ will operate is becoming ever more volatile. Many recent defence foresight efforts (JOE in the US, Strategic Trends and the recent UK Green Paper in the UK, the French Livre Blanc, NATO ACT’s Multiple Futures, etc.) have emphasized this profound contextual uncertainty. There is nothing particularly new about this. An analysis of many countries' defense white papers over the past few decades [and my colleague Paul Van Hooft is doing some work on this at the University of Amsterdam] would probably show this to be a constant: any 'new' threat analysis typically claims that some new trends create more threats and/or uncertainty. 

But none of those exercises explicitly embrace the new, potentially much more fundamental (and unsettling) 'background change' of what we might call ‘epochal uncertainty'.
Epoch is an admittedly somewhat infelicitous term. It is not widely known in the defense community. And people who are familiar with it may associate it with 'post-modernism', an intellectual current that has failed to get much traction in any of the more applied policy community (with some interesting recent exceptions). But beyond any theoretical or ideological debates, it seems clear that the epoch of the 'industrial age' has had much more impact on defense than most today acknowledge.     

There are various classification schemes for epochs (sometimes also called ‘ages’ – as in the ‘índustrial age’), but one of the most frequently used ones is based on the dominant human economic activity at any given moment in time. The next figures visualizes these ‘ages’ – from hunting and gathering, to agricultural, to the industrial age which peaks from the late 19^th century until after World War II. Since then, we have seen the service sector become the most dominant area of human economic activity – with the information sector starting to take the lead towards the end of the second millennium.

‘Epochs’ have an enormous impact on all areas of human life. We see the far-reaching implications in the current transition from the industrial to a post-industrial age all around us. All we have to do is to compare the life of our grandparents with our own lives in terms of technology, comfort, jobs, recreational opportunities, mobility, and even personal traits (physical appearance, life expectancy, self-identity, etc.). There is no reason to think that the military domain will be spared from this trend. This means that not only the future security environment might change more than we think today, but possibly even the very essence of ‘armed force’ in the post-Industrial Age itself. That the ‘armed forces’ of the future may very well look radically (even unrecognizably) different from the image we carry in our heads today.  A pre-historic (or even Medieval) warrior could not possibly have anticipated the form ‘armed force’ would take in the industrial age. When transported by a time machine to the industrial age he would certainly recognize eternal abstract elements in the conduct of warfare such as violence, guile, camaraderie, etc.; or even more concrete ones such as strike, force protection, manoeuvre, etc. – but he would feel totally overwhelmed by the massive application of new industrial-age physical and social technologies that were fully unfathomable in his age.  So too do we have to remain open to the likelihood that the physical and social technologies that will be embodied in post-industrial armed forces may transcend our current notions of ‘armed force’. Societies that will prove able to adapt more quickly adapt to these changes are likely to have a significant ‘evolutionary’ advantage over those that adapt slowly or not at all.

The following table attempts a preliminary overview of some of the important differences between the ages.  I would be really grateful for any comments people might have.

	Pre-industrial	Industrial	Post-industrial
Actors	Chieftains	‘Princes’ (link x nation states)	States + non-states
Armed Forces	Ad-hoc forces (no permanent larger than 3000 – v Creveld)	Permanent (industrial) armed forces	?
‘Arms’	Bare-handed/Cold	Industrial platforms/Hot	much more diverse (DIME+)
Organization	Clan	Linear	Network
Structure	Vertical simple hierarchy	Vertical multi-layered hierarchy	Heterarchy?
Connectedness	Singular force (all-in-one)	Connected (e.g. CS & CSS)	Distributed?
Weather	‘Fair-weather’	Year-round 24/7	Pervasive
Domain	Mostly land, some sea	Land-Air-Sea	Multi-domain (space, cyber)
Effects  through	Concentration	Mass (economies of scale)	Network (economies )
Level	Tactical	Operational(/strategic)	Fused
Projection	Local	Line-of-sight	Global
Mode	Hit-and-run / Siege	Linear Attrition & Manoeuvre	Network ?
Specialization	All-in-one	Advanced role specialization	Network
Time of ‘battle’	Punctuated	Punctuated	Pervasive
Leadership	Heroic leadership	Increasingly sophisticated C2	Network
Planning	Rudimentary planning	Deliberate purposive planning	Adaptive planning
Model	Small ‘star’ model	National ‘star’ model	Galaxy-model

In the current period of deep uncertainty, it is important to remind ourselves of the fact that the concrete embodiment of the concept of ‘armed force’ (in the sense of a combination of tools that enable policymakers to use extra-ordinary coercive power to impose their will on others) has historically not always been like it is today. And it may not necessarily always remain like this.