All Possible Wars? Toward a Consensus View of the Future Security Environment, 2001-2025. - Review - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2001 by Dr. Karl P. Magyar

All Possible Wars? Toward a Consensus View of the Future Security Environment, 2001-2025, McNair Paper no. 63 by Sam J. Tangredi. Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University (http://www.ndu.edu/inss/press/nduphp.html), Building 62, 300 5th Avenue, Fort McNair, Washington, D.C. 20319-5066, 2000, 212 pages, $16.00.

Tangredi's is an ambitious effort, not to provide yet another book on forecasting the future but to review 36 studies written independently by a variety of analysts between 1996 and 2000. This tasking is in support of the congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review concerning military strategy, policy, and force structure. The time period covered is from 2001 to 2025. The impossibility of predicting the future is a basic assumption, but it is reasoned that an objective, comparative study should reveal interesting similarities and contrasts. In the end, 16 points of consensus and nine points of divergence are identified.

Despite the fluid nature of the topic and the effort, such "future-revealing" analytic exercises are mandatory, as no military can prepare for its responsibility without articulating its future threat assessment. The final chapter presents a synthesis in the form of a future as it might be designed by consensus of the points of agreement.