Our nation faces a looming crisis — a dearth of intellectual capacity to understand or even anticipate the strategically relevant security implications of the ongoing science and technology (S&T) revolution.
Therefore, we must improve our structures and processes to recruit and, then, develop tomorrow's leaders of the joint force and the national security team. We then need to apply those insights to the art and science of preparing for and fighting war, and maintaining and enforcing the peace.
While increasing the depth and breadth of S&T offerings at the senior professional military-education institutions (the professional military education's war colleges) and their links to policy and strategy is important, the problem and its challenges are more comprehensive. We need to look at an integrated package of education and human-resource policies and approaches across a set of disciplines perhaps more appropriately focused on "strategic innovation."
Moreover, at all levels of military education, we need to develop an ever-unanimous "scientific competency," with an array of integrated and reinforcing studies throughout the life of a student, which complement and build on each other.
The specific national requirement is to recruit, develop and retain a cadre as part of the national security team who can think strategically about potentially "game-changing" disruptive technologies, and to employ that force as part of national strategy. These technologies are truly transformational, exponential force multipliers that would change the very way we think about war and peace. Possible examples include hypervelocity weapons, like the railgun, laser weapons and cognitive computing.
All will need some knowledge of this potential, and a much smaller subset will need to know this world intimately. There is another important aspect of this educational effort: teaching future leaders to be able to focus on what S&T developments would best support the national security strategy. It is a two-way street: Decision-makers need to be able to recognize emerging technologies that can alter strategies, while simultaneously advancing technologies that enable strategies.
If, as some defense analysts have said, our military technology is inferior to that of other major powers in areas such as air and missile defense, long-range conventional strike, electronic warfare, cyber and indirect fires on land, then it behooves us to invest in the brain power to make smart, timely decisions in S&T.
Are we losing our advantage in military technology because of diminished resources, because we make uninformed decisions about what technologies to invest in, or both?
Former US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel posited in 2014 that "our military could arrive in a future combat theater facing an arsenal of advanced, disruptive technologies that thwart our technological advantages, limit our freedom of maneuver, and put American lives at risk."
Through his Defense Innovation Initiative, he sought to deny that possibility — and to advance or, at a minimum, sustain our technological superiority. This is doubly difficult in a world in which the US government may have lost its advantages to the private sector or foreign sources.
Known to some as the "third offset," this initiative must include an aggressive effort to identify early and then mature individuals within the national security team who can think strategically, understand the intersections between and among technologies and policies, anticipate changes over the horizon, develop associated operating concepts for the future capabilities, and build and control the narrative that explains and garners support for this emerging reality.
Without such a national commitment to invest in our future by overhauling our education and human-resource systems, we will inevitably face the prospect of a nation unprepared for the next set of conflicts. Even worse, this new way of war may be "won" so quickly that we will not have the luxury of a mobilization phase. We must take steps now to address these shortfalls.
DuBois is a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and author of a forthcoming CSIS report, "Science, Technology, and the US National Security Strategy: The Role of the War Colleges."
