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Interview with the Pentagon's futurist
« on: 2003-01-31 13:17:53 » |
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http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.02/marshall.html
For 40 years, the man Pentagon insiders call Yoda has foreseen the future of war - from battlefield bots rolling off radar-proof ships to GIs popping performance pills. And that was before the war on terror.
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Named director of the Office of Net Assessment by Richard Nixon and reappointed by every president since, the DOD's most elusive official has become one of its most influential. Today, Marshall - along with his star protιgιs Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz - is drafting President Bush's plan to upgrade the military. Supporters believe the force he envisions will be faster and more lethal; critics say it relies on unproven technology.
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<Q> Is there a precedent for one country staying on top through a series of military revolutions? Or does one country always leapfrog another?
<A> Through most of the 19th century, the British Navy exhibited that kind of thing. But it was quite interesting the way they did it. They tended to let other countries, mainly France, do the early experiments and come out with new kinds of ships. If something looked like a good idea, they could come in and quickly overtake the innovator. They seemed to do that as a way of capitalizing on their advantage and saving resources.
<Q> Isn't the United States in a similar position now?
<A> That's probably the case. But some of the countries that would be candidates to make innovations aren't doing it. The Japanese and West Europeans aren't really making big changes. The Swedes are an interesting case. For 200 years their basic problem was the possibility of a large-scale land invasion by the Russians. They've decided that that has gone away. If anything could happen, it would happen across the Baltic. So they're rethinking, given modern technology, how to create a defense largely on sea frontiers. It's possible that they will make some innovations that we'll pick up and capitalize on.
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<Q> You're known for following technology outside the traditional realm of national security. Pharmaceuticals, for instance.
<A> People who are connected with neural pharmacology tell me that new classes of drugs will be available relatively shortly, certainly within the decade. These drugs are just like natural chemicals inside people, only with behavior-modifying and performance-enhancing characteristics. One of the people I talk to jokes that a future intelligence problem is going to be knowing what drugs the other guys are on.
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<Q> Does new technology ultimately make us more or less vulnerable?
<A> A friend of mine, Yale economist Martin Shubik, says an important way to think about the world is to draw a curve of the number of people 10 determined men can kill before they are put down themselves, and how that has varied over time. His claim is that it wasn't very many for a long time, and now it's going up. In that sense, it's not just the US. All the world is getting less safe.
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