Experts' vision of future warfare is not black and white

VIRGINIA BEACH

No matter what form future wars take, they will have one thing in common: complexity.

That was the theme Tuesday during the opening day of Joint Warfighting 09, a three-day symposium and trade show at the Virginia Beach Convention Center.

The event opened with a speech by Marine Gen. James Mattis, NATO's supreme allied commander transformation and commander of U.S. Joint Forces Command.

"I come with a sense of urgency," he told the audience. "The enemy is meeting like this as well."

Mattis outlined a future in which wars will not have clearly defined beginnings and ends. What is needed, he said, is a grand strategy, a political framework that can guide military planning.

At issue is how to maintain conventional and nuclear superiority while building a joint force that can defeat irregular threats.

Otherwise, he said, "we face being dominant and irrelevant at the same time."

Many of these threats will be hybrid, a mix of conventional and irregular warfare. Part of the answer lies in training forces in historical, geographic and cultural awareness, Mattis said. That should be accompanied by a looser form of command and control that gives front-line forces more latitude to adapt quickly to changing threats, he said.

Tuesday morning's panel session wrestled with what the world might look like for future joint force commanders.

While one can't predict the future, demography offers a solid guess, said panelist Thomas Mahnken, a former deputy assistant defense secretary.

Models show that 90 percent of population growth will come from the developing world, as the developed world loses population. This shift has implications for future coalitions and will reshape the way the United States views some countries, he said.

Carmen Medina of the CIA stressed that in a future, hyper-wired world, civilian casualties will be even less tolerated. It will therefore be up to field commanders to compete instantly with any negative story, regardless of its veracity.

Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer, author and newspaper columnist, argued that current global conflicts are compounded by Washington's discomfort with talking about religion.

"Great religions have outlasted every empire except our own," he said. "Whether or not God exists, people are hard-wired for faith."

During his keynote speech, Gen. Martin Dempsey, who commands the Army's training and doctrine command at Fort Monroe, echoed some of Mattis' themes.

The threats the United States will face will be increasingly complex and decentralized, Dempsey said.

"There will be no silver-bullet solutions," he said," and nothing that relies on a single instrument of national power."

Matthew Jones, (757) 446-2949, matthew.jones@pilotonline.com