CBRNeWORLD
Paul Scharre, senior fellow and director of the future of warfare initiative at the Center for a New American Security, talks to Gwyn Winfield about what future conflict might look like
The future is the
Machines, CBRNe World, April 2017), as the visionary contemplating what future operations might look like. If history has taught us anything it is that those who don’t innovate usually come off second to those who do. Krupp’s guns, Maxim’s machine gun and Fordian industrial practices are cases in point. Hindsight is a wonderful thing, but at
the time some things are far less obvious. Marshal Haig, for example, chose out of the Boer War in 1902 to ignore the lessons learned about the power of men in trenches, and to focus on the cavalry lance. The breech loading needle gun/Dreyse rifle had to prove itself successfully for 20 years on the battlefield before nations like France ditched their muzzle loaders. Too often technology has seemed a ‘flash in the pan’ to people at the time, whereas for future generations it has been so obviously the way forward.
shape of things to come W
“And the touch of that vapour, the inhaling of its pungent wisps, was death to all that breathes,” HG Wells, War of the Worlds
e mentioned Paul Scharre in the previous edition of this magazine (The War against the
One of Paul Scharre’s roles is to look
into the belly of the military beast and try and scry what the future holds. His predictions manage to be both dangerously exciting and rooted in the mundane – it’s so realistic it just might happen. Essentially what Mr Scharre is trying to predict is what the third offset might look like. For those unsure of what that phrase might mean, the first offset refers to a period in the 1950s when President Eisenhower increased funding on nuclear deterrence to offset Soviet conventional dominance. The second offset happened following the Vietnam war, when the Soviet nuclear capability matched that of the US and they had built up their conventional forces to overmatch those of Nato. This saw US forces attempt to build up technological forces such as stealth fighter/bombers to beat the masses of armour and air forces facing them. We are still living in the second offset… but only just.
The second offset has generated some fantastic, baroque weapons systems ©DoD As a short perusal of YouTube can
confirm, we are now seeing terrorist organisations utilising cheap, commercial drone technology with low cost munitions to cause serious damage to multi-million dollar platforms. In addition to this is the Russian fixation on both the land and air variants of combat drones (again URLs in last edition). If Nato forces don’t start trying to get ahead of the curve they risk being the equivalent of those proud muzzle loading nations waiting for the world to come to its senses. Paul Scharre is keen to point out
that the US military has embraced robotics - probably more so than any other nation. Drone strikes became synonymous with the Obama administration (http://www.
duffelblog.com/2017/01/obama-issues- farewell-presidential-drone-strikes/) and while unmanned ground vehicles (UGV) lag behind their aerial cousins, the Department of Defense (DoD) has continued to innovate.
www.cbrneworld.com CBRNe Convergence, Indianapolis Motor Speedway, Indiana, USA, 6 - 8 Nov 2017
www.cbrneworld.com/convergence2017
June 2017 CBRNe WORLD
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