David Jablonsky - Roots of Strategy, Book 4

Modern military forces normally work in an environment in which the major dilemma is that of properly matching continuity and change. The answer to this problem lies in the process of what Richard Neustadt and Ernest May call thinking in time streams. The core attribute for such thinking is to imagine the future as it may be when it becomes the pasta thing of complex continuity. Thus, the primary challenge is to ascertain whether change has really happened, is happening, or will happen. Whats so new about that? is the operative question that can reveal continuity as well as change.

It is not, however, an easy matter to draw reliable distinctions between the two in advance of retrospect. How, for instance, could Herbert Hoover have known in the spring of 1930 that the accustomed past would not reassert itself? Certainly there was no guide in the experiences of the 1893 to 1897 depression or the financial panics of 1907 and 1921. Nevertheless, such sudden change does not occur often in history; and continuity remains an important anodyne from the past that can inform the present and the future. This is why Thucydides can seem so contemporarywhy, for instance, the contest between Athens and Sparta in the Peloponnesian War resonated in the Cold War and why the expedition to Syracuse had overtones for Americas half-war in Vietnam.

Thinking in time is particularly helpful in peacetimea period in which military forces normally encounter an environment that is at best indifferent, at worst hostile. This is compounded at the theater strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war, since there is no basis in peacetime for complete feedbacktrue verification of the interaction of organization, doctrine, and technology. The military at such times, Michael Howard points out,

is like a sailor navigating by dead reckoning. You have left the terra firma of the last war and are extrapolating from the experiences of that war. The greater the distance from the last war, the greater become the chances of error in this extrapolation. Occasionally there is a break in the clouds: a small-scale conflict occurs somewhere and gives you a fix by showing whether certain weapons and techniques are effective or not: but it is always a doubtful mix. For the most part you have to sail on in a fog of peace until at the last moment. Then, probably when it is too late, the clouds lift and there is land immediately ahead; breakers, probably, and rocks. Then you find out rather late in the day whether your calculations have been right or not.

More often than not, these calculations will be wrong. What is equally important, however, is that strategic theorists have been at work asking the right questions, determining what can be jettisoned as ephemeral, what is of continuing validity, and how, in particular, the latter can be reduced to abiding principles. Such questions ultimately separate the variables from the constantsthe objective of all scientific thoughtand, as a consequence, allow some basis for establishing a capacity to quickly correct doctrinal problems when the moment arrives in which the military discovers that it hasnt got it quite right. The sea and air theorists represented in this volume pose these types of questions.