9 December 2017

WHY THE ARMY NEEDS A FUTURES COMMAND

NEIL HOLLENBECK AND BENJAMIN JENSEN

It is 2024. During the Russian presidential election, Russian-nationalist proxies attack Latvian forces with surplus equipment from the conflict in Ukraine. NATO responds, preventing nuclear escalation and blocking larger Russian conventional involvement through a combination of military and diplomatic threats, while U.S. airborne forces deploy to reinforce a NATO battlegroup outside of Riga. Artillery units deploy swarms of munitions, cheap hunter-killer drones that act as armed scouts using machine-learning to find, fix, and finish targets. Soldiers with occupational specialties that did not exist just several years ago take the field — like maintainers who fabricate their own drone repair parts with 3D printers and data technicians who help optimize predictive algorithms, integrating intelligence data with open-source information. These technologies are available today, but the U.S. Army has trouble reaching them, owing to a broken modernization enterprise.

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