Air power and the future battlespace

2009 ◽  
Vol 113 (1139) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
C. J. M. Goulter
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Military Force ◽  
National Strategy ◽  
Full Spectrum ◽  
Air Power ◽  
Inappropriate Use ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Strategic Direction ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War

The aim of this paper is to consider the role of air power in the future, within the wider security environment and across the full spectrum of conflict. The key is to make some reasonable assumptions about the future strategic environment for the next ten to fifteen years, extrapolating from our experience since the end of the cold war and our existing knowledge of potential state threats and substate threats and challenges. One of our failings since the end of the cold war has been to focus on the operational level of war at the expense of thinking hard about national strategy. The formulation of national strategy is supposed to be directed by government, but if that government fails to provide strategic direction, as it has done over recent years, the result is short-termist perspectives, and a ‘hand to mouth’ approach to crisis management. This has been reinforced further by financial constraint and the electoral cycle. Ideally, a strategic perspective helps us not only to set our current age in a much wider context, thus preventing or making us less inclined to ‘knee-jerk’ reactions to single events, but it also assists in the making of correct judgements about the nature of a conflict or scenario, thus enabling us to apply the appropriate type of tool (air power or otherwise). History is littered with instances of the inappropriate use of military force, and air power is no exception, and we cannot afford nugatory manpower and material expenditure. The challenge is, therefore, enormous: to meet current commitments, while preparing for future possibilities.

The Futurists. Experts in World Futures

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Other ◽  
Futures Studies ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Status ◽  
The One ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Images Of The Future ◽  
The Way

Alvin Toffler’s writings encapsulated many of the tensions of futurism: the way that futurology and futures studies oscillated between forms of utopianism and technocracy with global ambitions, and between new forms of activism, on the one hand, and emerging forms of consultancy and paid advice on the other. Paradoxically, in their desire to create new images of the future capable of providing exits from the status quo of the Cold War world, futurists reinvented the technologies of prediction that they had initially rejected, and put them at the basis of a new activity of futures advice. Consultancy was central to the field of futures studies from its inception. For futurists, consultancy was a form of militancy—a potentially world altering expertise that could bypass politics and also escaped the boring halls of academia.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jenny Andersson
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Critical Systems Thinking ◽  
Critical Systems ◽  
Political Ideologies ◽  
The Future ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Future Visions

The book proposes that the Cold War period saw a key debate about the future as singular or plural. Forms of Cold War science depicted the future as a closed sphere defined by delimited probabilities, but were challenged by alternative notions of the future as a potentially open realm with limits set only by human creativity. The Cold War was a struggle for temporality between the two different future visions of the two blocs, each armed with its set of predictive technologies, but these were rivaled, from the 1960s on, by future visions emerging from decolonization and the emergence of a set of alternative world futures. Futures research has reflected and enacted this debate. In so doing, it offers a window to the post-war history of the social sciences and of contemporary political ideologies of liberalism and neoliberalism, Marxism and revisionist Marxism, critical-systems thinking, ecologism, and postcolonialism.

Onopvallend turen naar de Russen

2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
SANDRA VAN LOCHEM-VAN DER WEL ◽  
HENK VAN LOCHEM
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
The Netherlands ◽  
Observation System ◽  
Existing Buildings ◽  
Aircraft Observation ◽  
The Future ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

Secretly watching the Russians. Cold War aircraft observation posts on existing buildings During the 1950s a network of aircraft observation post was built in The Netherlands, as a detection/observation system against low-flying hostile aircraft during the Cold War. Preferably, these were placed on highrise buildings. 134 of these 276 observation posts were built on existing buildings, on factories, mills, water towers, monasteries, government buildings and bunkers. Since their decommissioning in 1964-1968, many posts have been demolished. Approximately 37 posts on existing buildings remain, but mostly go unnoticed and many risk demolition in the future. These remaining aircraft observation posts are remarkable relics of our military heritage from the Cold War.

Military Force Planning and National Security

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mackubin T. Owens
Keyword(s):  
Strategic Planning ◽  
National Security ◽  
Emerging Technologies ◽  
Military Force ◽  
Military Policy ◽  
Structural Factors ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Force Structure ◽  
The Future ◽  
Force Planning

One component of military policy in particular lies at the very crossroads of strategic planning and structural arenas of policy. This is force planning, the interactive, intertemporal art intended to ensure that deficiencies in today’s force structure are being corrected while preparing for a future that may resemble the present or differ from it in unexpected ways. While force planners must think about what the future security environment might look like, what technologies might be available, and how future forces might leverage these emerging technologies to meet the challenges of a future security environment, they must always be cognizant of domestic structural factors. This chapter argues that a force planner must always be guided by a coherent strategic logic. Structural factors can never be eliminated, but a strong strategic rationale can minimize them.

Changing the Approach to Deterrence in Cyberspace While Protecting Civilians From Cyber Conflict

2019 ◽  
pp. 304-330
Author(s):  
Metodi Hadji-Janev
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
International Security ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Cyber Conflict

Many incidents in cyberspace and the response to those incidents by victim states prove that the cyber conflict is a reality. This new conflict is complex and poses serious challenges to national and international security. One way to protect the civilian populace is by deterring potential malicious actors (state and non-state) from exploiting cyberspace in a negative way. Given the changed reality and complexity that gravitates over the cyber conflict classical deterrence that have worked during the Cold War is not promising. The article argues that if the states are about to protect their civilians from the future cyber conflict by deterring potential attacker they need to change the approach to deterrence.

The New ‘Multiplex’ Cold War in the Indo-Pacific

2019 ◽  
pp. 45-67
Author(s):  
Timothy Doyle ◽  
Dennis Rumley
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Central Element ◽  
Regional Security ◽  
Security Cooperation ◽  
Security Environment ◽  
Regional Strategies ◽  
Sphere Of Influence ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Regional Primacy ◽  
New Strategies

In this chapter we argue that one of the principal inhibitors of sustainable security and stability in the Indo-Pacific region is that the Cold War has yet to end. Strategic concepts and postures reflecting containment, ‘constrainment’, sphere of influence, expansionism, and territorial competition still inhabit the rhetoric not just of the regional security environment. Regional strategies can therefore be interpreted within the framework of Cold War ‘logic’, thus impeding regional security cooperation. The ‘old’ Cold War has thus been perpetuated, reinforced, and reinterpreted as a ‘new’ Cold War due to geopolitical competition over global and regional primacy. Even within this process of geopolitical competition, old geopolitical concepts such as ‘pivot’ and ‘Indo-Pacific’ have also been reinterpreted and reused to justify new strategies that ultimately continue to foster a new Cold War in the region. Indeed, the Indo-Pacific has returned as a central element of the new Cold War.

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