Cohen Rachael S., Chandler Natan (ed.) The Future of Warfare in 2030. (Project Overview and Conclusions)

RAND Corporation, 2020. — 103 p. — ISBN: 978-1-9774-0295-0.The U.S. track record for predicting the future of warfare is notoriously poor. Robert Gates, U.S. Secretary of Defense from 2006 to 2011, famously quipped, “When it comes to predicting the nature
and location of our next military engagements, since Vietnam, our record has been perfect. We have never once gotten it right, from the Mayaguez to Grenada, Panama, Somalia, the Balkans, Haiti, Kuwait, Iraq, and more—we had no idea a year before any of these missions that we would be so engaged.”1 And yet, for better or worse, the U.S. military is deeply invested in the forecasting business because the services need to start building today what will be needed one or even two decades from now. Thus, the question becomes how to predict the future of warfare correctly.