The Army has moved out on its annual campaign to learn about the deep future of 2030-2040–called Unified Quest 2013–with its first event, a week-long Strategic Trends Seminar, the start of a series of symposiums, seminars, surveys, war games and exercises all culminating in a major September war game, officials said.
The result of all the explorations is to “integrate all those insights to help inform key decisions by our leadership as we work through the transition we’re in now, and that’s why we’re beginning to focus more deeply into the future,” said Maj. Gen. Bill Hix, director of Concepts Development and Learning at the Army Capabilities Integration Center (ARCIC) at Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).
“This year is the first year in many years we’ve had the opportunity to look beyond ‘now,’ into 2030 and beyond,” said Col. Kevin Felix, chief of Future Warfare Division at ARCIC. “For the last 10-11 years, it’s been about generating the types of capabilities that are required for soldiers in the field.”
The land force is transitioning from “execution to preparing for a complex future environment” beyond the Program Objective Memorandum (POM), he said during a media roundtable.
The Army cast a wide net to bring together a diverse group for the seminar to develop a working hypothesis of the nature of the strategic environment and warfare in 2030-2040.
These investigations are no new Army practice. It has long looked at its concepts and ideas, for example, in the Louisiana Maneuvers before World War II. Over time this work has produced such things as the integration of intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance from small unmanned vehicles to modular brigades and the infantry heavy Stryker Brigade Combat Teams with their emphasis on information and agility used in Iraq and Afghanistan.
About 125 people–historians, science fiction writers, government scientists, industry, academia, economists and political scientists–divided into four groups to view the future operational environment through geopolitical, technological, partner nation and economic/technological perspectives.
The seminar outbrief generating the most discussion was on geostrategic trends, Hix said. The seminar was to “discern trends, not future strategy, and within discussions on global trends, consider intersecting trends and U.S. interests.”
The seminar built on thinking about the future done by many, including the global trend report released by the National Intelligence Council earlier this month. That collaborative effort was informed by the TRADOC G-2. The Army is looking at documents considering the future from all sorts of agencies and foreign partners and allies.
“We have to leverage those ideas and concepts and understand where our thinking and theirs intersect or diverge or not and ask why,” Hix said. “It is imperative for the Army, to respond and shape events at speed to deliver on the objectives of national leadership.”
The year-long campaign of learning will inform the creation of a notional future force with future capabilities–which must be “plausible,” for the September war game, Felix said.
That means no “terminators,” he said. Future technologies offer amazing possibilities, but the seminar revealed that the technology, artificial intelligence and resource restraints means “we will be enabled but with some limitations.”
Hix pointed out there is a great diffusion of knowledge across the globe, with more people able to access it and with more working on it, more can exploit it, as in 3D manufacturing. However, the 3D printed gun blew up after six rounds, so that’s a technology that has yet to be perfected.
“As much as anything, technology comes down to people,” he said. “It is our human capital that is essential.”
Industry will play its part, Hix said. The year of learning will inform Army leaders as they consider investment options for needed or required future capabilities. For example, he said leveraging gaming technology could improve training and education, and the Army is already making some investment there. Leaders must be “informed by what we believe the challenges and opportunities of the future will be.”
Since the Army has to respond quickly, it will expect an order of magnitude improvement in capabilities, particularly when there are tighter dollars and more scrutiny on the return on investment. For example, a 10 percent improvement may be inadequate for what the service wants, Hix said.
Also, industry has to “offload the complexity from the soldier,” he said. “Offload complexity onto the system” and not require more people to make something work.
Vitally, the Army “needs systems and processes and the ability to respond to unfolding events at the speed events unfold, we don’t want to be playing catch up,” he emphasized. Also, systems must be more readily upgradeable, so they can be exploited going forward, so the service doesn’t have to start over from scratch.
Felix said some concepts, such as joint agility, come from the joint Capstone Concept for Joint Operations and exemplifies the work to be done. How does the Army actually make that idea operational? For example, if 3D printing becomes standard by 2030 it potentially would allow the Army to be more expeditionary as fewer soldiers would be in harm’s way by reducing the logistics trail.
The Strategic Trends Seminar is just the first step in looking to the future, Hix said. “Insights are not conclusions, they are vectors for us to continue to explore.”
It’s important to do this work, he said, to have some idea of what coming next, so you are not totally surprised.