Defense research programs should be preparing U.S. military forces for a future
that closely resembles the past decade, said Richard L. Kugler, senior research
fellow for the Institute for National Strategic Studies, a component of the
National Defense University, in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve fought three regional wars in the past 10 years,”
he told a recent defense science and technology conference. “That’s
what the future is going to look like—lots of messy little wars.”
Kugler cited a recent INSS research study warning that the increasing trend
toward globalization—cross-border flows in economics, information and
other factors—can have both good and bad effects.
“Europe is unifying slowly, and Latin America is democratizing unevenly,”
he said. Those are good things, he said. “But globalization also causes
dislocations and strains in regions that cannot compete effectively.”
An “arc of strategic instability” stretches from the Balkans to
the Philippines, Kugler said. In this region, weak governments, societies and
economies—plagued by poverty and unstable security—”set the
stage for chaos,” he said.
“While we have been very successful at defending Europe and Japan, we
have fared less well at operating in this arc,” he said. For example,
he said, “no serious defense planner would have predicted Afghanistan
a year ago. In fact, we got surprised by all three regional wars of the past
decade.”
Luckily, he said, the United States was prepared. “Eventually, however,
one of these wars is going to happen in a place where we aren’t prepared,”
Kugler said.
In this environment, the central requirement is for U.S. forces that are “flexible,
adaptable and modular,” he said. As it turns out, he said, “we have
a lot of that, not because we planned it that way, but because of the competitiveness
of the services and their component units.”