matthew carr is alarmed by the MoD’s predictions of the world’s ungovernable future |
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What are the armed forces for? Amid last week's revelations of weeping sailors, knickers and stolen iPods, a little-noticed publication cast new light on the kind of operations the armed forces might be involved in over the next 30 years.
Co-authored by the MoD's Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre, Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2037 does not represent official thinking. But it offers what its director, Rear-Admiral Chris Parry, calls "robust judgments across various alternative futures". The result is a bleak vision of the near future that falls somewhere between Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the apocalyptic imagination of a manga comic.
The scenarios outlined in Global Strategic Trends cover a wide gamut of probability - some of which are already recognisable. Few readers will be surprised by predictions of |
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| Like the US military, the MoD writers are fascinated by high-tech weaponry |
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massive population displacement as a result of climate change, of rising global inequality, resource conflicts and a reduction in oil supplies. Nor is the notion that competition over diminishing resources will require "moral compromises" with unsavoury regimes novel.
In purely military terms Global Strategic Trends, with its visions of unconventional urban wars fought in lawless mega-cities, imploding states and "ungovernable spaces" in which the traditional distinctions between military and non-military combatants become eroded, echoes the military futurism that has come out of the Pentagon in recent years.
The Strategic Trends team sees the UK armed forces operating in a dangerous and unstable world, in which potential conflicts are fought not just on land and the high seas, but in space, the media and cyberspace. Like the US military, the authors have a fascination with high-tech weaponry, from neutron bombs to 'electromagnetic pulse weapons' with the power to destroy enemy communications systems in a potential 'world city'. Some of this is familiar territory. But 
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