IT ALL STARTS WITH THE ENVIRONMENT. WHAT DO WE THINK THIS OPERATIONAL ENVIRONMENT WILL BE IN, SAY, 2030- 35? AND SO IN ORDER TO GET THERE, WE LOOK AT TRENDS.
not have quantum also, you could take apart their encryption systems. You’ll have unbreakable codes. You’ll be able to pro- cess data and present it in ways that we currently can’t, which kind of touches on the things that COL Cross was talk- ing about with the human factors and the ability to present information to people at lower levels.
and you look at how those things play out over the next 20 years, there’s a really unfortunate convergence in the decade of 2030 to 2040 in terms of urbanization, in terms of growth of populations, where those populations are expanding, with 90 percent of the population growth in the developing world.
If you read Eric Schmidt [and Jared Cohen’s] book, “Te New Digital Age,” they make the observation that revolu- tions will occur more rapidly and more frequently
in the future. Conversely,
they also note that it is unlikely that the speed at which things come apart will also be replicated by the speed at which things can be put back together again. So, in other words, it’s very easy to break Humpty Dumpty, but it’s really hard to put him back together again. You see manifestations of this in the Arab Spring and its aftermath right now, and the instability in all those countries.
You take that into account, you look at the survey of the world, you look at who’s going to be the principal arbiter in terms of trying to solve these prob- lems, and it’s quite likely going to be the United States. Te French have done a study out to 2040, and one of their con- clusions is that the United States will still be the principal power in the world.
You look at our force structure going down and the challenges that this envi- ronment poses—the speed of action, the speed at which events unfold, the second- and third-order effects rippling through a more tightly coupled international, geopolitical and economic environment, and it’s going to demand that we be able increasingly to influence events at speed with forces that can actually arrest the acceleration of events and direct them in other ways.
Tis [calls for] an operationally signifi- cant force that can get there quickly and rapidly influence those events—in some cases, preventing them or pre- cluding escalation, which is what we really want. One of the reasons the Army exists is to prevent bad things from happening. We want to deter people from stepping across red lines, declared or otherwise.
Army AL&T: On your website, you have “revolutionary,” “game-changing” and “leap-ahead” technology. So in ARCIC’s view, what would you envision as “revolutionary,” “game-changing” and “leap-ahead”?
MG Hix: Well, certainly quantum computing would be one of those areas where potentially, if your adversary does
We think the ability to connect those kinds of information technology together, to give ground Soldiers the kind of situ- ational awareness that we’re striving to achieve with the F-35 for a pilot, is an exceptionally important area. And that would be revolutionary. We’ll take a fighter pilot’s taxonomy, we won’t use a Soldier’s: If you look at [the late Air Force Col John R.] Boyd’s hierarchy, it starts with people, then ideas, then mate- riel or technology. His focus was on the fighter pilot; ours is on the leader. And right now we equip fighter pilots and oth- ers—ship’s captains, carrier strike group commanders, people like that, with exceptionally well-integrated tion environments.
informa-
Te Army is getting better at integrating those at the strategic and theater level; the operational level; division; [and] in some cases brigade, although we’re still working that. But what we’ve not been able to do, as Chris talked about, is push that down to the Soldier level, where those captains and lieutenants and ser- geants have the same kind of situational awareness that was alluded to in the
“60 Minutes” piece on the F-35 (http://
www.cbsnews.com/news/f-35-joint- strike-fighter-60-minutes/) [spotting an enemy plane 10 times faster than it spots the F-35]. Te people with the most complex military problem to solve and the least information technology behind them—those are those sergeants, lieuten- ants and captains at that level. And that
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