Military Review English Edition March-April 2015 | Page 14

effectively and morally in environments of uncertainty and
persistent danger.

The Four Fallacies of
Future War
Thinking clearly about future
armed conflict requires consideration of threats, enemies, and
adversaries, anticipated missions,
emerging technologies, opportunities
to use existing capabilities in new
ways, and historical observations
and lessons learned.

—The U.S. Army Operating Concept13

What military and civilian
leaders learn from recent experience is important because those
lessons influence operational
planning and force development.
As historian Williamson Murray
has observed:
It is a myth that military organizations tend to do badly
in each new war because they
have studied too closely the
last one; nothing could be
farther from the truth. The fact is that military organizations, for the most part, study
what makes them feel comfortable about
themselves, not the uncongenial lessons of
past conflicts. The result is that more often
than not, militaries have to relearn in combat—and usually at a heavy cost—lessons
that were readily apparent at the end of the
last conflict.14
Efforts to learn and apply lessons of recent armed
conflict consistent with continuities in the nature of
war will not go unchallenged. That is because four
fallacies that portray future war as fundamentally
different from even the most recent experiences
have become widely accepted. Those fallacies are
based in unrealistic expectations of technology and
an associated belief that future wars will be fundamentally different from current and past wars.
12

These fallacies are dangerous because they threaten
to consign the U.S. military to repeat mistakes and
develop joint forces ill-prepared for future threats to
national security.
The vampire fallacy. The first of these fallacies,
like a vampire, seems impossible to kill. Reemerging
about every decade, it was, in its last manifestation,
the RMA in the 1990s. Concepts with catchy titles
such as “shock and awe” and “rapid, decisive operations” promised fast, cheap, and efficient victories
in future war. Information and communication
technologies would deliver “dominant battlespace
knowledge.”15 Under the quality of firsts, Army forces
would “see first, decide first, act first, and finish decisively.”16 Those who argued that these concepts were
inconsistent with the nature of war were dismissed
as unimaginative and wedded to old thinking.
The vampire fallacy is much older than the orthodoxy of the RMA. Earlier manifestations go back
March-April 2015  MILITARY REVIEW