Global Trends and Future Warfare (Strategic Insights. Special Issue, October 2011)

摘要

The workshop whose proceedings are presented here was convened to provide the National Intelligence Council (NIC) with insight into the way war in the intermediate future, meaning the next twenty years or so, is viewed from the perspective of America s allies, partners, and potential adversaries. The group took as its starting point two works by the NIC: Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World, which seeks to identify emerging economic, social, geopolitical, and other forces that will shape the future security environment; and a more specialized study entitled Tomorrow s Security Challenges: The Defense Implications of Emerging Global Trends, which draws specific inferences from these trends with respect to defense organization, strategic planning, and the conduct of war.1 These documents served as read-ahead material for all the contributors, who were asked to consider how the issues they posed were viewed from elsewhere in the world, either in general or with respect to a range of specialized issues (cyber war, irregular warfare, access and area denial, nuclear proliferation, humanitarian intervention) of particular concern to the United States. The general theme of the workshop was the influence of global economic, technological, demographic, and other trends on the likely forms that international violence will take in years to come. Tomorrow s Security Challenges, prepared for the DoD s 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, proposed four alternative scenarios that, should they come to pass, will represent significant shifts from today s global security environment. These four scenarios provide four alternative contexts in which the future of warfare may be considered.