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A follow up with some good commentary on Global Trends 2025.

Dave Schuler writing at Outside the Beltway:

…This idea goes gack to Thomas Carlyle. It’s the “Great Man” theory of history and I think it’s a load of bull. While individual historical figures, e. g. Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mao, may bring color and texture to the fabric of history that fabric is formed by economics, demographics, and social structures. Gaius Julius Caesar might have elected never to cross the Rubicon into the precincts of Rome, fomenting the collapse of the Republic and the rise of the Empire. Rome would still have been expansionist and there would still have been an empire. Rome’s location, population, and way of life demanded it. We’d just have used some other word for monarch than Kaiser or tsar.

France was loaded for bear after the French Revolution. Even without Napoleon’s military genius it still would have spread the Revolution all over Europe. It might not have invaded Russia but it most certainly would have invaded Italy.

And so on. The ghastly thing about that pronouncement in this document is that it has nothing whatever to do with the meat of the document at all. Nowhere do the authors demonstrate how the choices of individual leaders will influence the world of 2025. If they’re saying that the world of 2025 is completely unpredictable because it will be so completely formed by the decisions of unpredictable leaders in that world they could have stopped this 120 page report at page 25.

There is a repeated confusion of absolute growth with relative growth. While emphasizing the significance of the latter they don’t seem to appreciate that it’s absolute power, strength, and wealth that’s important not relative power, strength, and wealth. China is powerful because of its enormous size not just because of its relative growth, however dramatic that might be. The U. S.’s continued absolute power, strength, and wealth despite the relative change in power, strength, and wealth insures U. S. pre-eminence for the foreseeable future, even with our present economic downturn. Were it otherwise Luxembourg would be the most important country in the world.

Read the rest here. 

There’s a synergy between great men and their times. Without Adolf Hitler, WWII is a localized, limited, war over the degree to which France and Britain  were going to accept Germany politically dominating the smaller states of Eastern Europe (Germany’s economic domination was inevitable). Without Germany’s defeat in WWI, Versailles and the Depression there would have been no Hitler as Fuhrer of a Nazi regime.

Dave is right that the document is very weak and in need of systems thinkers from the hard and soft sciences and experts on cultural touchstones. Except for a distinct minority, most professional historians shy away from that kind of extrapolation and speculation due to their methodology regarding evidence, or at least they limit the scope of such activities. Historians and futurists are not the same thing, though the two should engage with one another.

Historians as a group tend to excel at going deep on particular subjects with only secondary concern how that subject relates to everything else.  I’ve never been content to accept that, seeing historical knowledge as a platform or scaffold upon which to build new ideas. When I began my first master’s degree, I proposed doing a comparison of the development of the American Populist movement with the Russian Narodniki and People’s Will of the same period. The professor smiled wryly and said that topic was interesting but of a suitable size to be better left for a magnum opus to close out my career.

Analysis is enriched by consilience.

I’m getting errors in trying to download the Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World from the DNI.gov/NIC site despite having up to date Adobe Acrobat/Reader. Is anyone else having a similar problem ?

UPDATE:

Thanks Charles and Dan. 

In the meantime, while we wait for the USG to post a working link, here is some early analysis by Jeff at IntelFusion.

UPDATE II.

Courtesy of Shlok Vaidya –  Global Trends 2025: A World Transformed. Thanks Shlok – Fingar should offer you a job.  Will have comments on the report later tonight.

UPDATE III.

Commentary on 2025 in a series of posts at Atlantic Council by James Joyner, by Dr. Barnett and SWJ Blog,

UPDATE IV.

I’m still sifting the report but I’m not impressed. Aside from the cautious positions on possible developments heavily rooted in presentist analysis I kind of get the drift that the possibilities have not been looked at too closely as to how their interactions might or might not be countervailing with one another. Sort of an implicit assumption of synergism.

WIRED magazine has a post up about reviving the idea of nuclear powered jetliners:

Bring Back the Nuclear-Powered Plane!

“We need to be looking for a solution to aviation emissions which will allow flying to continue in perpetuity with zero impact on the environment,” Professor Poll tells the paper. “We need a design which is not kerosene-powered, and I think nuclear-powered aeroplanes are the answer beyond 2050. The idea was proved 50 years ago, but I accept it would take about 30 years to persuade the public of the need to fly on them.”

A better ( and safer) idea than putting a nuclear reactor on an airplane  would be a nuclear-powered super zeppelin. The crash risk would be minimal and  such a super-zeppelin would have vast advantages in lift over an airplane and be able to ship large quantities of goods virtually anywhere on earth.  Or it could hover semi-permanetly as a SIGINT platform with capabilities of being an “aircraft carrier in the sky” for UAV’s.

Inventive, aeronautical and physics types feel free to sound off in the comments.

Danger Room was most excellent today. Two items here worthy of attention:

Michael Tanji, my CTLab colleague, put in an appearance at Danger Room with How to Fix the Spooks’ New ‘Vision’:

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence recently released their new vision for the future of the spooks and spies community. And, shockingly enough, it’s actually pretty smart — sparking a bit of optimism for those who think serious change is too long in coming. It’s a more far-reaching document than I have seen come out of the IC (Intelligence Community) in the past. The parts about supplying intelligence to everyone from the Departments of Health and Human Services to international organizations to private sector and non-governmental organizations were especially heartening.

That said, it still doesn’t reach far enough. Everyone in the IC likes to say that we’re in a period of unprecedented and extensive change. If that’s the case, I’d expect the response to match the challenge. Some suggestions:

They’re good ones. Go read them!

Next, Noah Shachtman brings us some official Pentagon futurism pried loose by Justin Elliott of Mother Jones magazine with a FOIA request, Military Study Looked to Rome for Lessons:

The Pentagon’s legendary Office of Net Assessment is known for peering into the future of conflict — at subjects like wartime biotech, fighting robots, networked battles, and the military in space. The office’s head, Andrew Marshall, has been called the Pentagon’s “futurist-in-chief.” But for one study, concluded in 2002, Net Assessment-funded researchers looked back, to the empires of Alexander the Great, Imperial Rome, Genghis Khan, and Napoleonic France.

 Military Advantage in History  (PDF) is a fascinating read but very quirky in it’s historical interpretation. I base this assessment on a spot check of the Roman section where some elements are correct but some variables are underplayed – the political dynamics of proconsular authority begetting Roman aggressiveness and adaptiveness in the field or the resilience of the Roman state for example. The rush to try and synthesize such a vast scope of history in a few paragraphs will inevitably create distortions ( Napoleon or Alexander are far more manageable subjects for such abstraction – but they influenced rather than institutionalized in the long run).

The Armed Forces Journal cover story features Colonel T.X. Hammes giving an an “outside the box” reading list to change traditional thinking in defense circles:

“Read different”

Although the wider academic and business communities are coming to grips with the fact that many of these advances are changing the way we understand the world, the defense industry does not seem to see this as an issue. We still tend to view the world as responding to linear approaches applied by bureaucratic entities.

Fortunately, over the past couple of decades, a number of books have provided thought-provoking new theories of how the world works. Unfortunately, these theories do not align with the planning processes we use in the defense industry. The first step in fixing our planning processes is to examine how science’s understanding of reality is changing.The authors of these works highlight aspects of how the world has changed. This forces us to change how we frame problems, how we organize to deal with them and even how to get the best out of our people. For instance, if one still saw the world as a hierarchy, then one looked for the “leadership” of the Iraqi insurgency in 2003. Yet if one saw the world as a network in which emergent intelligence is a key factor, then one quickly saw the networked insurgent entities as they evolved an emergent strategy in Iraq. Our ability to adjust to the rapidly changing future security environment will, to a large degree, depend on our ability to understand the world as it is rather than as we have been taught to understand it. Reading these 12 books should help.

Here is the list, and it is a good one. I’ve read several, have some of the other books in my “antilibrary” and a few are new to me. You can go to the article to get some commentary regarding each book by Dr. Hammes:

Chaos: Making a New Science 

Linked: How Everything Is Connected to Everything Else and What It Means 

Commander’s Appreciation and Campaign Design ( U.S. Army pamphlet)

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software

The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials)

The Wisdom of Crowds

The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently…and Why

Hidden Order: How Adaptation Builds Complexity (Helix Books)

The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations

Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything

The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

An excellent list but one to which I think we need to add a few more. While any comments are welcome, I suggest that readers also chime in and nominate a couple ( 1 or 2) worthy reads that fit the spirit of Col. Hammes’ intent. My nominations are  Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century by Howard Bloom and Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson.

UPDATE:

Great recs are already in the comment section! I will start putting them together as a linked set of ” Reader’s Reading List”. Note also Smitten Eagle has posted up.