Capabilities

Capabilities are at the heart of any defense effort. Getting them ‘right’ has been, is, and will remain a fiendishly difficult task. For better or worse, defense organizations go into any crisis with the capabilities they have – not the ones they need or would like to have. We have come a long way in certain areas of capability development, as illustrated by recent experiences in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere. But these very same experiences also show that most of us still are far from getting it ‘right’.

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'.

Military technology

Having just posted some musings on the etymological roots of the word 'armed force', I also want to add a few thoughts about the concept of (military) technology. As with 'armed force', when we think of 'military technologies', we think of the 'hard' technologies that we have grown accustomed to - many of them industrial-age, a few ICT-age. But the story behind these two words may again prove counterintuitive to many.

The nature of 'Armed Force'

In work we have been doing at HCSS/TNO we have taken a closer look at the historical roots of many words we regularly use in the strategic community.

Making the leap...

As I have received some 'sabbatical' time from HCSS to write a book about defense planning, I decided to finally make the leap and to start a blog. I have been in the field of 'strategic studies' for about a quarter of a century now (yikes) - mostly at places that enjoy excellent reputations in this field. For ten years I worked at the RAND Corporation - on both sides of the Atlantic - and I am still very much a RANDite at heart ("improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis"). I've also worked at a number of European think tanks - the Stiftung Wissenschaft und Politik in Germany (which was created after WWII to be the new Germany's 'RAND'); what is now the European Institute for Security Studies in Paris; and for the past 7 years in the TNO ecosystem - the least well known of these places, even though it is by far the largest, with 4000 scientists of which about a quarter work in the fields of defense and security. In 2007 TNO created the The Hague Centre for Strategic Studies, where I now work to deal with the growing demand for strategic-level analytical support within the Dutch government and beyond.  [I certainly plan to return to my views on some of these institutes in future blog entries].