{"id":17086,"date":"2014-11-27T06:00:50","date_gmt":"2014-11-26T19:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/?p=17086"},"modified":"2014-12-02T07:13:24","modified_gmt":"2014-12-01T20:13:24","slug":"17086","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.aspistrategist.ru\/17086\/","title":{"rendered":"Thinking about the future"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>The topic I was given at the recent Submarine Institute of Australia conference was \u2018The Strategic Environment in the period 2020-2050\u2019. That gave me a chance to reprise in part a lecture I gave in 2010 at the Australian National University, when I was asked to prognosticate about the Asian security environment in 2050.<\/p>\n

As Neils Bohr is reputed to have said<\/a>, prediction is difficult, especially about the future. (He was half right, as we\u2019ll see below.) But at least this was a topic on which I wasn\u2019t handicapped by any pretence of being an expert, which would\u2019ve increased my chances of being wrong<\/a>. So I started off thinking about the lessons of history; how I would\u2019ve done had I been asked in 1910 to talk about the European security environment in 1950. I would\u2019ve started with the status quo; in 1910, the major powers would be those in the first column of the table below.<\/p>\n

In 1910, I\u2019d know about aeroplanes and submarines\u2014and the experts of the time would assure me that while they\u2019ll likely be of some marginal utility in warfare, they\u2019ll be unlikely to replace, or even seriously rival, tried and tested military systems such as the newly commissioned HMS Dreadnought<\/a>. And I\u2019d know about the political and economic theory of Marx and Engels<\/a>. But even if I read widely, I\u2019d have no way of knowing about the atomic nucleus, the discovery of which was announced by Rutherford a year later.<\/p>\n

By 1950, the power structure of Europe looked like the second column of the table, and the USA and USSR\u2014the latter now firmly a communist state\u2014were both nuclear powers. What had been a concert of European royal houses with complex and intertwined security guarantees and alliances had become a bipolar, politically charged nuclear-armed standoff. There\u2019s no reasonable prospect of being able to predict a change of that sort\u2014although H. G. Wells gave it a red hot go<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Table: Key European players and security relationships in 1910 and 1950<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
\n

1910<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n

\n

1950<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n

Austro-Hungarian Empire<\/td>\n\u00a0United States<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
British Empire<\/td>\nSoviet Union<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
France<\/td>\nNATO<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
German Empire<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Italy<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
Ottoman Empire (in decline)<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n
(Tsarist) Russia<\/td>\n<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

There are two notions we need to understand the transition between 1910 and 1950. The first is that extrapolation\u2014the basis for many predictions\u2014is likely to give an accurate prediction only up to a point of dislocation. That is, up to a major upheaval which fundamentally alters the strategic calculus and invalidates working assumptions. WWI\u00a0certainly fits that description; the pre-war world<\/a>, for all intents and purposes, ceased to exist. The second important observation is that factors on which future developments might critically depend can be in the unknown category. (And of either the known or unknown<\/a> variety.)<\/p>\n

We also need to guard against hindsight bias<\/a> when looking back in history for lessons about prediction. Knowing what happened, we can construct a narrative thread that links the Concert of Europe<\/a> through WWI to the Treaty of Versailles<\/a>, on to the collapse of the Weimar Republic<\/a>, to the rise of National Socialism<\/a> in Germany, and so on. There\u2019s no shortage of arguments between historians about the details or the significance of individual events, but there\u2019s (largely) a consensus about the causality.<\/p>\n

But we\u2019re only so \u2018sure\u2019 about that because those events actually happened. There\u2019s no way to run counterfactual simulations to see what would\u2019ve happened if some things had transpired differently. For example, we can speculate about the evolution of Europe after 1919 had the Versailles negotiations produced a less punishing outcome for Germany, but that\u2019s all we can do. Alternative pasts are unknowable. Former US Defense Secretary and sometimes philosopher Donald Rumsfeld summed the situation up neatly with this observation<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So when we try to look forward to 2050, we do so with unwarranted confidence that we understand the causal patterns of the past. There might well be factors that will play a critical role in the future that we\u2019re currently only dimly aware of or even can\u2019t know now. It\u2019s likely that any predictions made today\u2014even by non-experts who\u2019re more likely to be correct\u2014will hold only up to the next dislocation. If we knew the chapter headings in the future history books, we\u2019d be much better placed.<\/p>\n

Of course, that doesn’t mean we should throw up our hands and declare thinking about the future to be hopeless. Rather, any hedging or shaping strategies we come up with need to accept the limitations of prediction and contain enough flexibility to adapt when the unpredictable future becomes the (somewhat) less unpredictable past. You can read what I think that means for the future submarine program here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Andrew Davies<\/a> is senior analyst for defence capability and director of research at ASPI. Edited image\u00a0courtesy of Flickr user\u00a0Michael Heilemann<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

For an expansion on the ideas in the post, see<\/em> Known unknowns: uncertainty about the future of the Asia-Pacific<\/a> by Andrew Davies and Mark Thomson.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The topic I was given at the recent Submarine Institute of Australia conference was \u2018The Strategic Environment in the period 2020-2050\u2019. 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