Future of War Think-Fest at Sandia Labs

When you put 49 recognized visionaries together for two days in a windowless room, in the middle of the New Mexico desert, and ask them to talk about the future of things like war, terrorism, women's rights and globalization, some fascinating questions come up.

For example: Will women's rights survive the battle against religious extremism? Will the military use the elderly to monitor remote battlefields, thus freeing younger people for other tasks? Will online "blogs" reduce the influence of conventional media? Will international consortiums form their own armies? And will online banking affect national borders, becoming a primary source of e-globalization, virtual money laundering, and terrorist funding?

The 49 visionaries, along with their widely varied outlooks, gathered in the stark quarters of the Sandia National Laboratories’ Advanced Concept Group (ACG) in late September for the latest of what Sandia Labs likes to call "think-fests" to investigate long-range problems that could impact national and global security. And, as a National Nuclear Security Administration laboratory, Sandia hopes the visiting visionaries come up with some long-range solutions.

Discussing the future or war and peace were people from U.S. Special Forces and from conciliation groups. There were social and political and educational theorists. And there were people who know how to blow things up. There were people on third careers after spending decades in the military and people just starting out with degrees from Harvard. Eighteen were Sandia employees.

The visionaries were tasked with a single assignment: create four versions of the world as it might exist in 2025; inclusive globalization, pernicious globalization, regional competition, and a post-polar world where everyone works together and the U.S., while still considered the world's most powerful nation, no longer commands global dominance.

While no one conclusion emerged, there were many worth of further mind-play.

By 2025:

While in the past, the U.S. had resisted becoming dependent on a single supplier for strategic goods, it is now strategically dependent on China for consumer goods and credit.

The military will increasingly be concerned with peacekeeping and peacemaking; it will need a negotiating capacity, and a capacity to rebuild.

There will be “a rise in American humility, an acceptance that we can’t do everything and be everywhere.”

The military will focus on the remotely-controlled, less-manned battlefield. "Get in, get out, with no boots on the ground."

“We want the world to love us more, while getting all the things we got by being mean.”

Chinese military R&D funding is smaller than the U.S. but pays its researchers only 1/50 as much, so the amount of research done may be more similar than it seems.

Worldwide business consortiums may build their own armies to protect their investments.

Headline from 2025: “OPEC crashes; Muslims, anti-green terrorists blame U.S., China, EU” [because of fast rise of ‘green’ energy].

A continental state will be formed of Canada, the U.S., and Mexico, ending our border problems.

Adding anthropologists and sociologists to the mix of lawyers and military people who currently make most military decisions will provide more insight into what the U.S. will run into in places like Iraq.

You may notice that most of these predictions assume an overall decrease in the actual or perceived military power of the U.S. by 2025. At least one of the visionaries, Alan Williams an engineer in charge of the Georgia Tech Research Institute’s Future Threat Initiative, objected. “[Most of] these assumptions are that the U.S. won’t be the dominant military power in 2025," said Williams. "It’s my job to see that it remains so, and I believe that it will."