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On Future Thinking and Innovation: How Military Concept Writing can unwittingly suppress Innovation

Journal Edition
Volume 14, Number 1, Autumn

Abstract

‌This article examines military concept writing in terms of explorative and intentional concepts and contends that militaries ought to be circumspect about writing the latter because of their disposition to suppress innovation. The article contends that intentional concepts might be useful for relatively simple problems for which the means and knowledge to solve a problem are already available to an armed force but they are inadequate for the complex problem of future force development because they inexorably and needlessly limit the space within which to explore solutions and innovate. The article’s specific purpose is to dissuade the Army’s senior leaders from sponsoring comprehensive future operating concepts and encourage its members to proffer new ideas by writing limited-scope explorative concepts.

Introduction

The main purpose of military concept writing is innovation. The desire for armed forces to innovate is to seek an advantage over an adversary in some potential future war or during a war. Military concepts may also serve some other bureaucratic functions; nonetheless, the primary utility of military concepts is causing armed forces to change for the better. The subject of this article is the potential for some military concepts to do quite the opposite and suppress innovation.

A concept is something conceived in the mind. The term means an abstract idea and sometimes, a plan or intention. Likewise, military concepts take two general forms, an abstract form exploring ideas (explorative concepts) and an intentional or seminal form describing or prescribing intended ways of waging war (intentional concepts). This article contends that militaries ought to be circumspect about writing the latter because their seminal and closed form, coupled with their tendency to rely on predictions of the future, might suppress ideas and therefore suppress innovation.

The article contends that intentional concepts might be useful for relatively simple problems for which the means and knowledge to solve a problem are already available to an armed force but they are inadequate for the complex problem of future force development because they inexorably and needlessly limit the space within which to explore solutions and innovate. The article’s specific purpose is to dissuade the Army’s senior leaders from sponsoring comprehensive future operating concepts and encourage its members to proffer new ideas by writing limited-scope explorative concepts.

The article begins by outlining the differences between intentional and explorative concepts before investigating the consequences of intentional concepts’ reliance on visions of future warfare and how this feature of intentional concepts stifles innovation. The article then explores how explorative concepts overcome this weakness and promote innovation. The article concludes by suggesting ways armed forces can avoid the intentional-concept trap. It recommends a modernisation approach which seeks advantage over potential adversaries by encouraging a contest of ideas, aggregating the resultant innovations and opportunistically seeing where they might lead rather than trying to prescribe a comprehensive blueprint for waging warfare in the future.

Intentional Concepts and Explorative Concepts

Intentional concepts are normally seminal and prescribe the way a whole force or subsystem thereof ought to function or ought to become. Examples of intentional concepts are future-force operating concepts such as the Australian Defence Force’s Future Joint Operating Concept, the United States Army’s Operating Concept: Win in a complex World, the British Army’s Joint Capability Note 1/17, Future Force Concept, the Australian Army’s Adaptive Campaigning – Future Land Operating Concept and its now superseded Objective Force 2030. Intentional concepts also include warfighting-function concepts such as a concept for future manoeuvre, a concept for air and missile defence or a concept for information operations. They constitute an intention for how to wage war and they might prescribe the desirable characteristics and desirable mechanisms of an entire force or a sub-function/element thereof. They deal with their subject thoroughly and they are singular in the sense that senior officials confer authority on them and there are no similarly authorised alternatives. They are similar in nature to doctrine, just in draft form.

Explorative concepts on the other hand explore potential solutions to discrete problems or tender original ideas and conjecture. They are not normally comprehensive; the organisation and the author do not intend for the work to be seminal; explorative concepts have a limited scope and co-exist with other alternative ideas and solutions for the same or similar problems. Explorative concepts are not bound by a single theme or subject. They derive from ideas and a desire to solve problems. An example of an explorative concept is Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan’s Distributed Manoeuvre: 21st Century Offensive Tactics, which explores potential new tactics in light of the 2006 Israel/Hezbollah War.1 Another example might be a concept to overcome an air and missile defence network, tendering for example a novel way to mitigate the system’s sensors. Another might explore how the depletion of oil reserves in the future might affect weapons and warfare, proffering a system of logistics that is not reliant on internal combustion engines.

Both types of concepts are creations of the imagination and are future- oriented. After all, comprehensive concepts which are authoritative, and which are not about the future are, by definition, a doctrine. The important difference between the two concept types is one is closed the other is open. Intentional concepts provide an authoritative and comprehensive prescription or intention. They achieve their aim in a single document and are normally accompanied by a plan for their implementation. Even if the organisation tests the prescriptions in an intentional concept, the experimentation can only ever lead to disproving the concept, causing the authors to go back to the drawing board to come up with another, or illuminating flaws within the concept leading to its refinement. In other words, it bounds the scope of thinking, ideas and solutions. Similarly, any subordinate or associated concepts, such as a logistics concept, must also be limited by the scope of the master document. Intentional concepts are therefore closed; they constrain thinking and ideas to the scope of the document and the limits of the authors’ imaginations.

In contrast, explorative concepts conjecture, investigate and solve. They are limited in scope, focussing on a particular idea or a particular problem. They achieve their aim indirectly and over time by inviting other authors to challenge the assumptions behind the ideas, encouraging disconfirming evidence and stimulating alternatives. Anyone may author an explorative concept; they need not originate at the direction of a senior official. They begin with the question, ‘what if’, and build on a body of knowledge that has many contributors. They are open-ended; but they are not without end. In the manner water works to shape a stone, or in the manner a group of ants manages to get a portion of leaf to their nest by pulling in different directions, the influence of many related, unrelated and contradictory conceptual documents exploits an idea, solves a problem and become manifest.

The Problem with Intentional Concepts: Visions of the Future

Armed forces ought to prepare for warfare in the future and they ought to seek to create advantages over potential adversaries; this is the purpose of concept writing after all. But they also ought to recognise the future is irreducibly uncertain. No amount of imagination or creativity can reveal the context for a future war any better than a random guess.2 We may understand the general features of the future because certain properties of the universe, human kind and war are inviolable and because we know the starting conditions – we know what warfare is like now. Nonetheless, the particulars of future wars and warfare are unknowable.

Despite this self-evident truth, concepts such as the Australian Defence Force’s Future Joint Operating Concept and the Army’s Future Land Warfare Report (the intended basis for conceptual work), make quite specific predictions about the context for warfare many years into the future. For example, despite recognising the dangers of future prediction, the Australian Army Future Land Warfare Report does the very thing it warns against.

It counsels:

Such an examination, however, necessarily avoids any attempt to predict the future. Given the almost infinite variability of human interaction, such prediction is unlikely to be helpful in designing forces for future conflict.3

But in the very next sentence the report predicts:

…the changing character of war clearly suggest that land forces will [emphasis added] continue to play the decisive role in the security of modern states against both regular and irregular adversaries.4

It also predicts; for example:

For the Army, operating in high density urban terrain will [emphasis added] no longer be a discretionary activity.5

[T]he force will become increasingly enmeshed with external enabling capabilities and require much greater use of civilian infrastructure in the conduct of operations.6

To be fair, these are rather minor and cherry-picked examples; nonetheless, accepting even these simple statements as inevitabilities rather than possibilities could have decisive implications for the design of a force. Yet making these sorts of assertions is almost unavoidable for authors given the task of drafting intentional concepts. Intentional concepts, by definition, are a plan or intention; therefore, they must have a specific context. Given the future character of the intention, the context for the concept must exist in the future. Intentional concepts must therefore rely on an authoritative vision of future warfare.

Adaptive Campaigning exemplifies this approach. It first outlines its vision of future warfare before prescribing its response.7

The [concept] consists of two parts. Part 1 … reviews global and regional trends and projects these trends into the future to forecast the broad characteristics and security implications of the future global security environment … [It] concludes by reviewing contemporary trends in warfare, combining these with the global and regional trends, to extrapolate the characteristics of the future operating environment … Part 2 … articulates the Army’s concept for dealing with the anticipated future operating environment.8

This observation is not a criticism of the concept itself. It was largely a description of emergent features already present in warfare at the time of its writing, and its response largely constitutes restatements of unchanging continuities of war and quite reasonable assessments of the possibilities of existing and emerging technologies. Nonetheless, as will be discussed later in this article, Adaptive Campaigning’s focus on contemporary circumstances is symptomatic of another inherent problem of intentional concepts.

There is an undoubted attraction to the apparent prudence of imagining and describing the future context and then imagining and designing a proposed response to the imagined context as Adaptive Campaigning aimed to do. It makes, for example, the business of justifying materiel acquisition quite simple. One need only compare the imagined future force to the contemporary force-in-being, highlight the differences between them (referred to as gaps in the modernisation jargon) and come up with a to-do- list or shopping list to mitigate the differences in the intervening years.

This approach to modernising armed forces seems rigorous and prudent. It looks ahead to the long-term, and so it appears to be ‘strategic’ as opposed to reactive, short-term or ad-hoc – terms which are often pejorative in the world of force design. It begins with the end in mind and works backwards to determine the work needed to produce the imagined force. It aims, quite wisely, to do the work before a future war happens rather than be caught on the hop. The approach provides a sense of certainty. It is unsurprisingly like the orthodoxies of contemporary military operations planning and project management; but modernising armed forces is not quite the same as planning future operations and concluding projects efficiently.

The apparent rigour and prudence of this method are founded on shaky ground because the basis of the analysis is a figment of the imaginations of those describing the future vision. It places undue confidence in something irreducibly uncertain. While it is prudent to think about how emerging technologies and events might affect the future, it is a gamble to bet resources and money on a single reading of the tarot cards (particularly one which is often negotiated and agreed to by a committee!). This approach belongs in the predictable and relatively static worlds of engineers and project managers. It does not fit a dynamic and uncertain world.

Every new tactic, structural change, materiel acquisition and piece of doctrine is intended to give an armed force the greatest possible advantage over its next foe, but each is fraught. Something in the environment may change unexpectedly at any moment causing the changes to prove to be irrelevant or wrong. There can be no guarantee any change to doctrine, tactics, organisation or materiel will contribute to an armed force’s advantage over its adversary. The emergence of the dreadnought at the end of the 19th century is an example of an emergent change which caused many previous innovations to be immediately obsolete. Consequently, armed forces ought to be wary of committing too strongly to a particular flavour of modernisation based on an apparent trend, and they ought to be ready at any moment to cut their losses, abandon projects made obsolete by a dynamic world, adapt anew to the emergence of new features in warfare, and not lament too much that someone in the organisation did not anticipate the impossibly unpredictable emergence before it happened.

The implication of the importance of exigency and contingency is that no single concept can solve all military problems because it is impossible to imagine all future adversaries, their intentions and the political context and exigencies for a potential war. Operational templates are a very poor substitute for strategy. Consequently, without specific plausible contexts, intentional concepts are inevitably exercises in banality and sophistry. They tend to be gross and unnecessary elaborations of widely accepted and timeless principles and features of war. Either this or the effort to say something novel or profound results in barely comprehensible nonsense.

Take for example the banality of the following statements from Australian Army and ADF comprehensive concepts:

… in 2030, national power may be expressed violently, or in non- violent ways, or as a combination of both.

… new technologies and emerging operational approaches will offer innovative force design options.

Army force development will need to devise flexible structures and approaches that can generate mass and resilience in the land environment.

… our enemies will often attempt to apply tactical pressure in order to achieve direct strategic advantage.

… a credible warfighting capability is necessary to make deterrence effective.

People are central to gaining, developing and exploiting knowledge. And take for example the near incomprehensibility of these statements:

… the joint force must know the pattern of an operation. It must know the critical points at which the adversary’s cohesiveness is vulnerable, and how these might be manipulated, disrupted, degraded, or destroyed with the maximum economy of effort.

Information collection is fundamental to competitive knowledge advantage.

The ability to project military power creatively, in ways that deny the possibility of coherent action to the adversary, will remain fundamental.

The nature of the Australian joint force means that it must work to prosecute actions without recourse to mass, while practicing economy of effort and maximising the resilience of assigned units.

Precision will continue to substitute for mass; and operational calculus will continue to turn upon the application of force in a way that defeats the coherence of the adversary’s effort.

Future analysis and the drafting of associated intentional concepts are not just the fields of banality and nonsense; they are likely to be bias-rich fields too. The future has not happened yet, so opinions and assumptions about it are not subject to the normal expectations for evidence and often impossible to either prove or disprove. Consequently, future visions of warfare are always at risk of defining the future as the author or authors (or committee for that matter) would want it to be. Future air, land and sea concepts, for example, rarely paint a picture of the future in which the air, land or maritime force is less relevant. They rarely forecast a more peaceful or more stable world.

If the concept is to be employed as the basis for a case for government expenditure on new materiel and more resources, then the future vision is likely to have a strong bias favouring the particular materiel the organisation seeks to acquire. The absence of evidence about the future means alternative visions of the future are impossible to weight. Any assertion about the future is as plausible as another is as long as it accords with the laws of physics and the continuities in the nature of war. There is, therefore, a fine line between a vision and a delusion.

Whether the vision of the future is biased or not, concepts based on authoritative visions of the future are reactive. They describe a response to a fixed predicted circumstance rather than contributing to creating a new circumstance. In other words, the author imagines a circumstance and responds to it rather than seeking to create a new circumstance and have others respond to it. This point is critical because it goes to the subject of agency to alter the future. The future-vision-based approach does not account for the ability of people to change the course of history by their own actions and innovations.

The future is not autonomous; we determine the future by our actions now. Recognising one’s agency allows one to recognise the agency of others, and so we begin to appreciate the future is dynamic, highlighting the serious limitations of deterministic visions of the future and static and reactive concepts. If two adversaries are seeking advantage over each other with a view to a potential future war, then force modernisation might progress along the lines of action/response in a continuous cycle akin to a duel. Intentional concepts, like some battle plans, may be redundant before the ink is dry.

Some people might suggest that the solution to these flaws in intentional concepts is to experiment with the concept once it is completed, but the experimentation is inevitably limited to the scope of the ideas in the document, serving merely to refine the concept rather than result in better alternatives, or to cause the authors to go back to the drawing board and start a new intentional concept from scratch. Experimenting with the ideas within a concept cannot result in a change to the context within which it fits or the ends for which it is written. Alternative futures and alternative concepts lose out.

The expression of the purpose of the Australian Army’s last intentional concept, Adaptive Campaigning, is an example of this phenomenon. It states:

The purpose of Adaptive Campaigning – the Future Land Operating Concept … is to provide conceptual, doctrinal and force modernisation direction to Army, to ensure it remains postured to meet the demands of future operating environments.9

Implicit in this statement is the idea that by simply following the direction set by the concept, the Army will be postured to meet the demands of future operating environments. In the next paragraph the concept states:

Additionally, [Adaptive Campaigning] forms the philosophical framework for change and provides development guidance for the Army of the future. This is to ensure that the Army is ready for the demands of operating in a future complex security environment. [Adaptive Campaigning] provides a common lexicon and model for planners to analyse future challenges.10

Implicit in this statement is that change ought to occur within the limitations of the ‘framework’ of the concept – again, to be ready for the demands of operating in a future environment. The last sentence asserts that the common lexicon expressed within the concept and the bounds of the concept form the prism through which force designers and others should now view future warfare. The authors’ assumption is that the framework they have set is sufficient to understand future warfare and make any changes to the force necessary to be ready for some future war. What then for outlier ideas which are inconsistent with the model? Alternative ideas are likely to lose out, particularly if the concept becomes the basis for the case to a government to acquire new materiel and resources, or to make structural or cultural changes to the organisation. The danger, therefore, is intentional concepts can easily become a dogma, particularly those with a strong organisational mandate or authority.

Alternative ideas which challenge authoritative intentional concepts work against the materiel, resource and change rationales that derive from the concept. Consequently, leaders may ignore, or at worst suppress, contrary ideas and debate to preserve the rationale lest the government or others question the basis for an important acquisition or for more resources. The intentional concept therefore becomes a bureaucratic trump card – ‘well it does not matter what your evidence indicates because the concept says ….’ This ignorance or suppression might be unwitting and occur even if the contrary idea proves an acquisition or resource expenditure to be unnecessary. It is the modernisation equivalent of the age-old military problem of fighting the plan rather than the enemy. In other words, once locked in, an intentional concept, particularly if it has strong institutional authority, is difficult to challenge and is therefore likely to become dogma.

One might argue, for example, the strength of the idea of the centrality of the civilian population and the importance of gaining its support in war and warfare in Adaptive Campaigning, is an example of an intentional concept becoming a dogma. The United States Army’s counterinsurgency doctrine of the last decade is another example.11 These perspectives on waging war became the narrow frame through which many military professionals came to see the world of warfare, making the practitioners blind, potentially wilfully, to possibilities outside of those frames thereby closing off a world of alternative ideas, theories and innovations. In fact, some authors go as far as to suggest the United States counterinsurgency doctrine of the last decade became a template for warfare in lieu of strategy.12 So strong was the dogma in the United States, many within the United States Army who expressed doubts about the counterinsurgency doctrine were marginalised.13

Adaptive Campaigning and United States counterinsurgency doctrine were both important and relevant when they were written. Despite their flaws, they were still of enormous value to armies wrestling with how to deal with contemporary problems of warfare. Nonetheless, they may be harmful in the long-term because they did not accept they may be incomplete or may have flaws, nor did they acknowledge that a single concept or doctrine for warfare is unlikely to be appropriate for every circumstance. Concepts and doctrine are not a substitute for strategy.

Explorative Concepts: Embracing Ambiguity, Uncertainty and Agency

Open-ended limited-scope concepts, in contrast to intentional concepts, account for the future’s plasticity and the agency of the authors writing them because appropriate responses to future’s uncertainty and plasticity are those that let go of certainty. As author and journalist Tony Schwartz implores, ‘The opposite [of letting go of certainty] isn’t uncertainty. It’s openness, curiosity and a willingness to embrace paradox.’14 Exploratory or open-ended concepts are inherently curious because they begin with conjecture or the kernel of an idea. Whereas the genesis of intentional concepts is the desire to simply have a concept about warfare or a subset of warfare, such as manoeuvre or fires, the genesis of explorative concepts is ideas and a desire to solve problems. The former concepts begin with direction – ‘write a concept for future warfare’ or ‘write a concept for information operations.’ The latter begin with a question, an idea or a problem – ‘what if we converted all our armoured vehicles to remote control?’ or ‘how do you break into a city without presenting a concentrated target for enemy precision strike?’ Ideas and a desire to solve problems rather than prescribe something mean explorative concepts are more likely to result in innovation than intentional ones.

Explorative concepts are not dependent on predictions of the future. They contribute to the aggregation of many ideas and innovations causing emergent properties to manifest in a force thereby improving it. Answering questions like ‘what if we converted all our armoured vehicles to remote control?’ do not require one to predict the future to discover the answer, and in discovering the answer know whether the result is worthwhile exploiting.

Explorative concepts aim to create unforeseen opportunities beyond the imaginations of authors of singular visions and intentional concepts (and the leaders and committees who sponsor them). These emergent properties create or alter the future rather than respond to it. Like random mutations in an animal species, the organisation becomes fitter for its environment by incorporating each advantageous mutation rapidly throughout the organisation. The resultant emergent properties, like any emergences in complex systems, are unpredictable.15 In other words, explorative concepts account for agency of the individual in altering the future and they account for the advantages of serendipity.

Rather than begin with a clear end or goal in mind, one begins with a question expecting that in the attempt to answer it, something valuable will emerge. An example of this process was the Reichswehr’s invention of a system of fighting labelled Blitzkrieg. The leaders of the Reichswehr ‘did not deliberately set out to create a new way of fighting;’ they did not imagine Blitzkrieg in the early 1920s. There was no intentional concept for a new way of warfare.16 In fact, the Germans “aimed to build upon the operational, and particularly the tactical lessons of 1914-1918 in a coherent and effective fashion.”17

The Reichswehr began with a specific problem, which it felt required immediate resolution. Germany’s relatively limited resources and workforce meant it was essential for it to win a future war quickly lest its enemies have time to bring to bear a preponderance of resources and workforce like in the previous war.18 The Germans began with a problem: how to restore mobility to a stabilised front or prevent a front from stabilising so that victory might come quickly, and they began with the conjecture that mobility would be essential.

In fact, Blitzkrieg emerged from an almost backward-looking approach. It began with a comprehensive study of the last war, which was characterised by a relatively static continuous line of trenches running through France and Belgium on one front and a far more mobile type of warfare in the open spaces of the east.19 The Reichswehr put many minds to the problem; fifty- seven separate committees in fact.20 Its officers made conjecture, trialled new ideas and, on occasion, erred. Its officers recognised advantageous developments and transferred them rapidly throughout the army before conjecturing, trialling and erring again (a process very similar to the scientific method).21 From the aggregation of these modifications emerged, arguably, a novel way of warfare that appeared revolutionary to those unacquainted with the process, causing an American pundit to coin the label Blitzkrieg.22

Blitzkrieg did not emerge from a revolution per se, nor did it emerge from a comprehensive vision of future warfare or some profound first principles analysis; it emerged from an evolutionary process of ad-hoc integration of incremental innovations to the existing organisation.23 The Reichswehr’s process did not accord with the grossly simplistic and linear ‘concept-led/capability-based’ slogan for example. Concept and capability emerged in tandem.

Scholars Barry Watts and Williamson Murray observe that innovations of the Blitzkrieg kind:

rarely reach fruition over short periods of time. They require military organisations to weave together many disparate elements within a complex tangle of interactions created by the personalities, strivings, values, past experiences, history, visions, and cultures of the individuals and institutions involved. The process of such innovation in peacetime appears to be highly nonlinear.24

Importantly, Watts and Murray go on to point out:

What this observation means is that innovation displays the extreme sensitivity to current and initial conditions that gives rise to the loss of long-term predictability: the most minute differences in initial or current conditions can, over time, give rise to completely different outcomes and can spell the difference between successful innovation and failure.25

So not only does major innovation take a long time, the result of the most important innovations is a function of circumstances in the present and it is unpredictable. Innovation proceeds on a course beyond the control of a central body or a central ‘strategy’.26

It is important to remember that Blitzkrieg also became something of a dogma. The solution to the problem Germany faced in its immediate context fared poorly when applied outside of that context in the vast expanses of the east.27 A single concept or doctrine is unable to deal with all circumstances and an incremental approach to modernisation that aggregates innovations can result in dogma just as readily as an approach based on an intentional concept if the organisation is not careful to remember concepts and doctrine are not a substitute for strategy.

This factor notwithstanding, existing technologies, emerging technologies, emergent features of contemporary warfare, contemporary political exigencies and reflection on warfare in the past were central to German innovation rather than a prediction of future warfare and an attendant comprehensive future concept. In fact, historians Williamson Murray and McGregor Knox and their counterparts have shown military innovation rarely (if ever) occurs by imagining a future context and responding to it.28 Innovation derives primarily from solving problems and exploiting ideas to improve the fitness of the present-day force. It is “unavoidably nonlinear, contingent, and infected with serendipity.”29

Innovations also tends to occur when the need is greatest. Necessity is the mother of invention after all. The United States Army’s development of the air-land battle doctrine, which was influential for at least two decades, was in large measure a response to the revelations of the Yom Kippur War and the pressing need to deal with the immediate and pressing possibility of Soviet invasion of Western Europe.30 American carrier warfare innovations derived from solving the problem of how to wage war against Japan across the vastness of the Pacific Ocean.31 United States’ interwar amphibious warfare developments had a similar need and began by reflecting first on the failed British Gallipoli campaign.32 Vague and general problems like responding to some general future ‘operating environment’ lack necessity and are unlikely to induce innovation.

Notwithstanding the points so far, there is value in imagining different futures as a catalyst for novel ideas. Imagining the world with one or two altered features for example, can stimulate creativity. This was the advice given by Australian science fiction writer John Birmingham to an Army symposium at the Australian Command and Staff College in 2010. To illustrate his point, Birmingham asked the audience to imagine the world without oil and then to imagine waging war in a world without oil. The audience proffered several novel ideas in response to the challenge, some of which might have utility whether the world runs out of oil or not. The exercise was a catalyst for ideas. This type of future thinking sits firmly inside the explorative conceptual approach, not the intentional approach. It begins with a question - what if the world ran out of oil? – ends with conjecture and novel ideas that contribute to a broader body of knowledge. It makes no attempt at prediction.

Even Watts and Murray point to the importance of developing visions of the future:

Military institutions not only need to make the initial intellectual investments to develop visions of future war, but they must continue agonizing over such visions to discern how those wars might differ from previous conflicts due to changes in military technology, weaponry, national purposes, and the international security environment.33

Nonetheless, Watts and Murray are not talking about comprehensive visions like a seminal future warfare report or comprehensive future operating concept; they are referring to something more akin to Birmingham’s thought experiment; changing variables and asking, ‘so what?’ They point to the importance of contingent circumstances like national purpose. They are encouraging us to explore and debate the potentials of emerging features of warfare and politics, not to derive an answer. They caution us to treat the future as a dynamic and ambiguous thing, warning against clear and comprehensive predictions:

As both Blitzkrieg and interwar carrier aviation attest, any vision of future war is almost certain to be vague and incomplete rather than detailed and precise, much less predictive in any scientific sense.34 

Conclusion

The often heard laments by Australian Army officers that the Army is not future-focussed and that it is too caught up in the present to give the future sufficient attention are probably misguided. Unfortunately, this possibly misguided identification of the problem means staff effort is potentially diverted into future forecasting and writing intentional concepts rather than asking questions, solving problems and exploiting ideas through explorative conceptual papers.

Discomfort with uncertainty and ambiguity is human.35 It is particularly understandable in large government organisations because embracing uncertainty and ambiguity is bureaucratically messy and inefficient. It involves missteps and dead ends. It is difficult to apportion money to open- ended questions and research and hold someone to account for efficient and prudent spending. When research and problem-solving efforts come to a dead end, result in a misstep, or an emergent idea or innovation causes the organisation to change direction midway through a major project, people will tend to exclaim, ‘how did we let this happen?’ or ‘why can’t we ever just stay the course?’ Ambiguity and uncertainty also cause many people to feel uncomfortable and others to declare that their leaders lack a clear-eyed vision of the future. These people do so potentially without realising that their desire for their leaders to eliminate uncertainty and ambiguity might stifle the very innovation and debate that is so important to modernisation.

There is likely to always be a desire to predict the future and prescribe the type of future force needed to deal with it to give force designers and capability acquirers unambiguous parameters for their work. They will desire a comprehensive ‘aiming mark’; yet, the continuous and dynamic nature of force modernisation makes the idea of a defined and static ‘aiming mark’ incongruous. There is no need for a comprehensive concept of future warfare to recognise the need to adapt the workforce for the introduction of a new capability for example. Likewise, there is no need for a comprehensive concept of future warfare to recognise the need for a design parameter which ensures digital connectivity between all future materiel acquisitions. Intentional concepts are not necessarily helpful in identifying these sorts of needs and probably just reiterate a need well after someone has already recognised it and begun to deal with it.

An explicit modernisation approach which seeks advantage simply by aggregating innovations and opportunistically seeing where they might lead rather than one which begins with a specific result in mind might overcome these tendencies. The recent spiral acquisition development in the Australian Department of Defence, the Defence Entrepreneurs annual gathering to pitch ideas to senior officials, the creation of the Australian Army Research Centre and the Army Research Scheme, Army innovation days, and the Australian Army’s decision to write more limited-scope explorative concept papers are important recent steps in the right direction.

But, they are not yet widely understood by many members of the Army. Many would still like to see a comprehensive future concept and a clear implementation plan for how to bring it to fruition. Others will question the value of open-ended research and open-ended explorative concepts which are unconstrained or unguided by a governing concept or central direction. Explorative concepts, like fishing, might take many casts and lots of wasted bait before a worthy fish is netted. Casts which fail to provide a fish are seemingly wasteful. Yet not to cast is to deny oneself the opportunity to catch a fish at all; and to cast only within one pond as defined by an intentional concept is to arbitrarily limit the number and types of fish available.

The place for intentional concepts is at the end of exploration, not at the beginning. Their purpose is to transfer knowledge and understanding. In this sense, the intentional concept is the solution or prescription to which that exploration has led. Another name for it is doctrine.

Endnotes

  1. Justin Kelly and Mike Brennan, 2009, Distributed Manoeuvre: 21st Century Offensive Tactics, Land Warfare Studies Centre Working Paper No 134, Canberra
  2. Dan Gardner, 2010, Future Babble: Why Expert Predictions Fail – And why we believe them Anyway, McClelland & Stewart, Toronto, p 25
  3. Future Land Warfare Report 2014, Department of Defence, Canberra, 2014, p 3
  4. Future Land Warfare Report 2014, p 3
  5. Future Land Warfare Report 2014, p 9
  6. Future Land Warfare Report 2014, p 12
  7. Future Land Warfare Report 2014. p 9
  8. Future Land Warfare Report 2014, p 4
  9. Adaptive Campaigning, p 3
  10. Adaptive Campaigning, p 3
  11. See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/learning-to-eat- soup-with-a-spoon
  12. See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/learning-to-eat- soup-with-a-spoon
  13. See http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/learning-to-eat- soup-with-a-spoon
  14. Tony Schwartz is the author of the 2010 book, The Way we are working isn’t working: The Four Keys to transforming the way we Work and Live published by Free Press, New York. This quote is from an online article in the Harvard Business Review titled, ‘Turning 60: The Twelve Most Important Lessons I’ve Learned so Far,’ 2012, at https://hbr. org/2012/05/turning-60-the-twelve-most.html
  15. See the quotation from philosopher Sir Karl Popper in Peter Urbach, ‘Good and bad arguments against historicism,’ in, Gregor Currie and Alan Musgrave eds, 1985, Popper and the Human Sciences, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Dordrecht, p 138
  16. Williamson Murray, 1996, ‘Armored Warfare: The British, French, and German experiences,’ in Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett, eds, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 44
  17. Murray, 1996, p 44
  18. Gunther E Rotheberg, 1986, ‘Moltke, Schlieffen, and the Doctrine of Strategic Envelopment,’ in Peter Paret ed, The Makers of Modern Strategy: From Machiavelli to the Nuclear Age, Clarenden Press, Oxford, p 296
  19. James S Corum, 1991, The Roots of Blitzkrieg: Hans von Seekt and German Military Reform, University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, p 37
  20. Corum, 1991, p 37
  21. Williamson Murray, 2000, ‘Comparative Approaches to Interwar Innovation’ in Joint Force Quarterly, NDU Press, Washington DC, Summer, pp 85-86
  22. Murray, 2000, p 84
  23. Murray, 2000, pp 84-85
  24. Barry Watts and Williamson Murray, ‘Military Innovation in Peacetime,’ in Murray and Millett, p 375
  25. Watts and Murray, p 375
  26. Murray, ‘Comparative Approaches,’ p 85
  27. Williamson Murray and MacGregor Knox, 2001, ‘The future behind us,’ in MacGregor Knox and Williamson Murray eds, The Dynamics of Military Revolution 1300-2050, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, p 181
  28. Murray and Knox, 2001, p 181
  29. Watts and Murray, ‘Military Innovation in Peacetime,’ p 381
  30. See Jeffrey S Wilson, 2011, ‘Transformational Leadership: William De Puy’s Vision for the Army,’ in Military Review, The Army University Press, For Leavenworth, Sep-Oct
  31. See Geoffrey Till, ‘Adopting Carrier Warfare: The British, American, and Japanese case studies’, in Murray and Millett, Innovation in the Interwar Period
  32. See Allan R Millett, ‘The development of amphibious warfare between the wars: The American, British, and Japanese Experiences,’ in Murray and Millett, Innovation in the Interwar Period
  33. Watts and Murray, ‘Military Innovation in Peacetime,’ in Murray and Millett, p 406
  34. Watts and Murray, p 406
  35. Gardner, Future Babble, p 7

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