4.1 THE COLD WAR SCENARIO CEASES TO BE PREDICTIVE
There is of course no denying that the Cold War planning scenario is no longer predictive of the next confrontation. Whatever that confrontation may turn out to be, it is highly unlikely that it would be global or that it would involve a peer competitor. Rather, it would most likely consist of a succession of contingencies involving smaller, less capable, enemies and it would not follow a predictable sequence of locations in the world. In any event, one single scenario will no longer be sufficient.
Therefore, the first reaction to the collapse of the Warsaw Pact was to replace the single Cold War planning scenario with a set of seven contingency confrontations including, of course, war on the Korean peninsula, war in the Middle East, and war with a resurrected Russian empire. With time, this set of scenarios has changed its content as well as its size. Thus, while still planning for the Korean scenario, we were called upon to fight in Iraq. Once the Gulf scenario was added to the planning set, we were called upon to fight in Afghanistan. Obviously, these changes, being entirely reactive, did little to recover the predictive power that the Cold War scenario once had. In fact, it is fair to say that it would be a peculiar coincidence indeed if the set of planning scenarios, which naturally contains our past wars, would also include the future ones.
The community is well aware of how useless this peacetime game of fighting the last war really is to the task of controlling command technology. Consequently, it tried to plan to a scenario that would be so general as to encompass almost all, if not all, wars our nation could be called upon to undertake in the future. The natural consequence of this attempt was a significantly larger compass of technologies than the nation would either need or could afford; an all-encompassing scenario would naturally lead to a significant degree of over-arming.
While, of necessity, still using either a set of scenarios or an all-encompassing scenario for planning its acquisition of new technology, the military establishment has began considering the idea of planning to a capability set rather than to a scenario set, although the interested community is far from being agreed as to what that should mean. In any event, the general hope is that one may thereby force command technology to produce the kind of technology that will give us the capability to fight any foe, in any location, and at any time, thus dispensing with the need to predict the future.