That sage American philosopher Yogi Berra once said "the future isn't what it used to be!" I had an opportunity to validate that astute observation a couple of weeks ago, when we had the privilege of helping the Acting Under Secretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness, Brad Carson (and one of his principal career execs, Frank DiGiovanni), design and conduct a 'war game' to consider the policy, program, and technology requirements for the Defense Department's bold new Force of the Future (FOTF) initiative.
Championed by Carson and Defense Secretary Ash Carter (see the complete story here), FOTF is intended to do just what its title implies: Look into the next decade and try to project the capabilities that our military forces and the civilians that support them will require in order to successfully accomplish DOD's mission.
That's a tall order. As Mr. Berra suggests, almost any prediction about the future will likely miss the mark. But that wasn't the point of the war game. Rather, its focus was on ensuring that the military and civilian personnel policies and enabling technologies that will shape and enable the Force of the Future will be agile enough to adapt to almost any scenario and contingency. His premise is that those policies—most of them decades old and never designed to deal with a future that looks like today, much less the world of 2025—are in drastic need of modernization.
However, when you start talking about modernizing the department's military and civilian personnel systems, you stampede a whole herd of sacred cows. That's where the war game comes in. It offers a relatively safe environment to envision the bureaucratically (or politically) challenging. And by testing today's strategies and systems against a set of plausible scenarios that an organization may face in its future, it's far less threatening to the status quo…at least overtly.
However, make no mistake about it. A war game, especially one that focuses on the fuzzy far future, is ideal for challenging that status quo, but in a subtle, stealthy way. That is in part because participants who have a stake firmly planted in the present can tell themselves that, "by the time all this happens, I'll be long gone!" However, much of what is discussed in war game is really about today—it's just not specifically labelled as such—and thus, at the end of the exercise, many of those present-day sacred cows tend to get put on the butcher's block.
At least that's been our experience. We've been doing war games and exercises for decades at Booz Allen Hamilton, but they typically focus on a military OPLAN or a national security strategy or some emergency or crisis like a cyber attack. However, this one—designed to gauge whether DOD would be able to recruit and retain military and civilian talent in the 'brave new world' of 2025—was unprecedented, and a credit to Under Secretary Carson's innovative leadership.
Think of the stakes. To support the all-volunteer force even in a steady state, our armed forces must find, recruit, evaluate (for both physical and mental acuity), and rigorously train tens of thousands of young men and women every year. And with almost a million civilian employees in DoD, even a modest attrition rate of five percent a year means that the Department must annually replace more than 50,000 of them as well.
Those big numbers are only part of the challenge. The Generals and SES members of tomorrow are in elementary and junior high school today, and in the next few years, they will begin to think about college majors and initial career choices they'll make ten years from now. What will shape those decisions? What will they be looking for in a career…and how will they go about the looking? Will they consider military or civilian service when the time comes? What will the world of work—and in DOD's case, war—look like then, especially as the convergence of commercial and defense technologies potentially spur yet another 'revolution in military affairs' of the sort we saw in the first part of this century. And will DOD be able to compete for the best and brightest of our citizens? Add up all those wicked questions, and you can see the value of a war game to addressing them.
It would be inappropriate for me to reveal what actually went on in the war game (code-named TALENT Leap to conform to the Joint Staff's official war gaming nomenclature), or what it actually accomplished. We'll leave that to Under Secretary Carson and his team. But just the fact that DoD has done something this innovative is newsworthy, especially since the future isn't what it used to be…not just for DoD, but for all of us.
Ron Sanders is a vice president and fellow at Booz Allen Hamilton.
