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commentary

of the 13th Generation
By L E W I S W A R E

WARRIORS

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he article by Lieutenant General Jay W. Kelley, USAF, the commander of Air University, on “Brilliant Warriors” which appeared in the last issue of JFQ offered various thought-provoking ideas on professional military education (PME). Since the author sought to stimulate debate, let me accept the challenge. Kelleyassumes that PME should teach students to recognize strategic environments of the next century as “alternate futures.” They “are descriptive,” he says, “not predictive or normative.” Thus from the outset he begs the question of the reality that such futures claim to represent and in which officers will be expected to operate. Even if one succeeds in grasping the general shape of “alternate futures”for objective scrutiny, nowhere does he spell out how to validate their concrete nature. One is asked, in fact, to view alternate futures in terms of “planning stories or scenarios.” Thus it may be hard to resist predicating the future on subjective predilections.
U.S. Air Force (Ken Wright)

Lewis Ware is on the faculty of the Air Command and Staff College.

8

JFQ / Summer 1996

WareIf alternate futures are nothing more than plausible constructs of reality, Kelley nevertheless encourages applying a rigorously objective method in creating them. The system chosen to build the future uses the same inferential reasoning that he asserts is sufficient in order to know the past. As proof he claims that a proportional relationship exists between creating alternate futures andcommercial profitability. Thus, for a business to neglect shaping the future environment in which it expects to sell its products might entail a loss of its market share to another business that does. By the same token, one is counseled, a military that does not generate alternate futures may lose the nation it serves. Equating the loss of a market to the loss of national security is inappropriate.The military does not make a product whose profitability determines the degree to which national survival may be assured. On the contrary, it is one of many instruments whose power ensures the execution of policy on which national security is based, security itself being the result of many complex social, political, economic, and military interactions. The marketplace comparison is perhaps more aptwhen one service is bested by another for a share of the defense budget. But even here the survival of one service vis-à-vis another, to say nothing of a nation as a whole, is never in doubt. Still it is not surprising that Kelley frames our national survival in such terms since services are expected to make the ultimate sacrifice to defend the Nation and undercapitalized militaries are presumedto be weak. Though conclusions about the future can be drawn from present evidence, to make similar inferences from the past may ignore the objectivity of established facts. Alternate futures dismiss the past by absolving us from tediously analyzing empirical data, enabling us to make theoretical quick fixes on reality. The need to infer the nature of both the past and future is an occupationalhazard of the military that flows invariably from pressure to act decisively. For this reason, the process proposed can rapidly become an exercise in expediency if driven by

concern that any action is preferable to misdirected action or no action at all. This perspective leads to other pitfalls. The need to pick the right future from the profusion available encourages Kelley to suggest thattechnology will provide the instrument of analysis to validate the correct choice. From here, it is but a single step to define the sole purpose of education as helping the military select the proper technologies to evaluate alternate futures. But more than a simple instrument of analysis, technology will itself ultimately become, to his mind, the facilitator by which the next generation of officers...