Å forske på Forsvaret i fremtiden : muligheter, begrensninger og kognitive fallgruver

All studies of future military requirements are based on ideas of how the strategic environment will develop over the next years or even decades. At the same time, these ideas exist only in our imagination. We can never be certain about what the future may bring. This report discusses how we develop ideas about the future within the defence sector. It shows that it is possible to develop military foresight, but that it depends on the manner in which we think. Experts, who are often used to inform defence planning and decision-making, are not necessarily very good at predicting the future. There are, however, two different types of experts: hedgehogs, who know one big thing which they apply on everything, and foxes, who know several, smaller things which they use to study the future from different perspectives. The foxes’ way of thinking has proven to be systematically better at predicting the future than that of hedgehogs. This report uses the key characteristics of how foxes think to discuss how we can improve our understanding of probabilities, big and unexpected events, new information, and how far ahead it is possible to predict questions related to security policy and defence planning. The report identifies six cognitive pitfalls, which are particularly common in the defence sector: 1. Short-sightedness in the long-term defence planning – where the political and human tendency to focus on current events can lead us to overreact, e.g. to the Russian intervention in Ukraine, when the decisions to be taken require us to see decades ahead. 2. Premature cognitive closure during threat assessments – where new and surprising information does not lead to proportional changes in the defence planning scenarios. 3. Feelings about the military – where what we feel about our branch or certain individuals can lead to misjudgements, e.g. of the benefits and risks of new technology or methods. 4. Abuse of historical analogies – where we draw simplistic parallels between past and current events, which serves to weaken our critical thinking and judgements of probability, as well as dictating the implications, because we «know what happened last time». 5. Hedgehog ideas of future warfare – where we develop simple, coherent and final answers to the question of what future wars will be about and how they will be fought, e.g. conducting network-centric warfare or protecting ourselves from today’s hybrid warfare. 6. Stubbornness in times of war – where the same mechanisms that undermine thinking in peacetime can lead to catastrophes in war, e.g. when officers refuse to alter plans. The report also describes how we can seek to avoid each of these pitfalls in practice. This includes methods such as distinguishing between temporary shifts and fundamental changes, looking for weak signals, red teaming, allowing people with a high tolerance for ambiguity to lead the work, studying military history in width, depth and context, and being honest when assessing exercises and war games. Most important, however, is the way in which we think about the future in general. The best forecasters are characterised by openness, curiosity, accuracy and a genuine desire to get better at predicting the future. All of these abilities can be improved. In order to create greater awareness of how we think about the armed forces in the future, this report proposes a prediction tournament for the defence and security community in Norway.