Earlier this year, two authors writing for the Brookings Institution posed an intriguing question: “Is the U.S. military’s futurism obsession hurting national security?” Their argument followed a series of exchanges in other forums on the competing relevance of futurism and traditionalism in national security thought. Futurists might argue that they are merely counterbalancing a defense community that is traditionally past-obsessed, using outdated equipment and training for the last war. The rising popularity of futurism has placed that philosophy at odds with that of traditionalism, leading to a false premise that one or the other must be right.

True creative transformation in the U.S. defense and intelligence communities will only take place once the two camps accept the reality that they could both be wrong. Thus far, this debate has occurred at the policy level among well-meaning observers not responsible for the application of their theories. This shortcoming ignores the fact that the ideas of both camps must be implemented in the tactical fights where battles are won—a grueling and often unpredictable place.

For most of its post-Cold War existence, the United States has enjoyed the luxury of tactical supremacy and has thus laid blame for its recent failures at the feet of policymakers and strategists. As Gen. James Dubik wrote in 2014, America wins battles and loses wars. This is a biting critique, but it would be more so if the former were untrue. Russia’s war on Ukraine provides valuable lessons that call into question the permanence of American tactical dominance. Those lessons reveal the need for tactical creativity that brings futurists and traditionalists together to seek a better understanding of not only how the United States would fight alongside an army like Ukraine’s, but also how it might perform against one.

To test this theory, the authors of this article are military practitioners who identify as a traditionalist and a futurist, respectively. This paper examines the characteristics of the two major thought camps, explores opportunities to bring them together by optimizing joint force creativity in a nexus camp, and considers how that camp might stack up against the creative potential of America’s pacing challenge, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) of China.

Why Creative Culture Matters

Senior defense leaders and critics of U.S. professional military education often point to the imperative of creativity to win future wars through “intellectual overmatch.” Most of this literature, however, focuses on policy with little regard for how those ideas might trickle down to the unit level. Analysis of the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War shows that small and distributed teams developing solutions to tactical problems can be decisive when supported properly. To take a page from Gen. Charles Krulak, Ukrainian forces exercised ingenuity to gain the advantage through “strategic corporals.” This strategy was perhaps most evident in the defense of Kyiv, in which a network of drone enthusiasts passed Russian armor positions to Ukrainian targeting nodes, corrected indirect fire, and even fashioned explosives to octocopters for dropping onto Russian dismounts. These developments support the research of scholars such as John A. Nagl and Frank Hoffman, who found that the process of identifying and closing military performance gaps is most effective when pursued by those who will apply those solutions in the fog of war.

Historical precedent indicating that tactical creativity is a generator of battlefield advantage is abundant. Hedgerows stalled Allied movements in World War II until a sergeant from Chicago designed a hedgerow-cutting device known as the rhino to modify Sherman tanks. Decades later, coalition forces defeated heat-signature-initiated improvised explosives in Iraq with a battlefield modification of the same name. Future conflicts may require similar creative solutions at tempo, scale, and speed to win decisively, or perhaps to simply avoid losing.

Chartering companies to design strategies that foster creative culture is a booming private industry, yet the U.S. Army rarely extends creativity trainers to military intelligence leaders in a brigade combat team or a field artillery targeting cell within a division. In some ways, developing the creativity layer in a tactical formation is antithetical to the army’s structure. Though they may contradict the legacy of hierarchical military thought, acceptance of greater risk, charismatic instead of traditional authority, and free-thinking teams gain the competitive advantage at war. To nurture such teams, futurists and traditionalists must work together to build a third camp.

Camp One: The Prophets

A mentor of ours once said, beware of those who talk too much about the future because they cannot be held accountable for it. The American futurism craze arguably began in the post-Vietnam era, but the more recent incarnation could be attributed to the widespread assumption that—as Gen. Mark Milley said in 2016—the world is “on the cusp of a fundamental change in the character of warfare.” This might be true, but no one yet knows what that change will look like, and the unique characteristics of each war are rarely prophetic signposts of the next. Strategic theorists from Carl von Clausewitz to Colin S. Gray have cautioned against the siren song of confident prognosticating, but there seems to be more of it today than ever.

Prior to and shortly following Russia’s invasion this year, some declared that the tank is dead (a claim that still exists), or that force-on-force warfare was a thing of the past. Everything from hypersonic missiles to quantum computing and the metaverse have ignited the imagination of futurists, many of whom bet their careers on the transcendent promises of these technologies. Unfortunately, the defense enterprise struggles with long-term forecasting, as evidenced by missteps such as the M-551 Sheridan tank, Future Combat Systems, or visions of imminent transparent battlefields in the 1990s. Worse even, prophets tend to exaggerate the influence of present conditions on long-term trends. Rest assured, the fog of war is as thick as ever, which means Occam’s Razor could still apply to military estimates even as the most spectacular explanations of the future are the most appealing to the imagination.

In John Gaddis’s estimation, a good theory must explain the past, for only if it does can we justify what it might tell us about the future. On the other hand, some research shows that digital natives “have higher demands for the quality and usefulness of technology,” which means the next generation service member could be more inclined to seek digital solutions to every military problem. To allow functional creativity to thrive, prophets must humble themselves before the altar of Clausewitz’s unholy trinity of fog, friction, and uncertainty. In other words, to again call upon Gaddis, prophets must not become so confident in their theories about the future that they fail to imagine a world detached from them. The second camp can help with that.

Camp Two: The Historians

One may find the traditionalist reciting aphorisms such as, “history doesn’t always repeat itself, but it rhymes,” or Napoleonic maxims that exalt the moral dimensions of war. By its nature, this camp looks to the past, but that should not diminish its value when imagining the future. For example, while Adolf Hitler’s Blitzkrieg may have caught the last-war-focused French Army off guard in 1940, Germany’s breakthrough was nothing more than a strategic penetration that utilized armor in the maneuver. Considering Alexander the Great favored similar tactics at Boetia and Gaugamela in the fourth century B.C., the concept of a penetrating maneuver is certainly not new. Germany was creative enough to find a new way of doing something very old, thanks in part to the musings of Major General J.F.C. Fuller and Sir B.H. Liddell Hart, both historians in their own right.

Still, history is not a how-to manual, and the many insights it offers are not always transferable to the present. Historians like Sir Michael Howard and Margaret MacMillan tell us that history cannot be a guide for the future, only a window into existing and often complex truths. Indeed, the traditionalist might abuse history by grasping at obscure references and linking them to modern precedent in the hopes of anticipating outcomes. Worse still, some may draw the wrong lessons from history entirely, as U.S. officials Doug Feith and Paul Wolfowitz did by painting Saddam Hussein as a sort of Middle East Hitler to help justify the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The historian alone is prone to miss opportunities exclusively in the wheelhouse of prophets, such as those related to emerging panoptic digital strategies employed by the Chinese military, thereby overlooking critical vulnerabilities to mobility. Traditionalists may also fail to recognize the opportunities in an opponent’s panoptic designs. Military analysts collaborate on these problems in certain advanced intelligence readiness venues. During a recent Army Foundry Platform course on Fort Bragg, North Carolina, intelligence analysts participated in creativity workshops by examining how Geert Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory might influence tactical and operational military challenges. These venues, where minds meet to attack wicked problems, carry us to our third and arguably most important camp—the nexus.

Camp Three: The Nexus

While exercising caution to avoid presentism, the observation of current conflicts in a historical context can and should serve as a muse for creative thought. A key component of the Ukrainian Army’s success against Russia has been its skillful balancing of what has worked with what might work. Small unit tactics, artillery barrages, and demolition of infrastructure such as bridges played as much of a role in Ukraine’s gains as repurposed drones and exploitation of the information space. Though the tank may not be dead, the proliferation of small, smart, and cheap technologies is a revolution in its infancy with implications not yet clear to observers. Ukraine found a way to allow these truths to coexist rather than pitting them against each other.

Recent developments in historical research may present opportunities to nurture such thinking elsewhere. One of these developments is the increasing popularity of applied history and the study of social or cultural military history as opposed to purely operational military history. Founded in 2016, Niall Ferguson and Graham Allison’s Applied History Project at Harvard University is a prominent example of the growing interest in the field. At the very least, applied history provides the contextual framework to help leaders close the cognitive gaps between what is possible and what is probable. Military unit historians and local university faculty, for example, are woefully underutilized resources in creative defense initiatives.

There is already a foundation of nexus-type programs within the U.S. military. Commanders simply need to expand upon them. At the service level, the Association of the United States Army’s annual Leader Solarium, inspired by President Eisenhower’s creative approach to wargaming Cold War strategy, is one example. The U.S. Army Mad Scientist Initiative’s Back to the Future conference is another, one that seems to be closest to the mark in terms of bringing traditionalists and futurists together. Yet most service members are unaware of these valuable platforms and therefore uninterested in any potential benefit provided by their existence. Some units have pursued their own innovation programs, such as the XVIII Airborne Corps’ Dragon’s Lair concept and the 82^nd Airborne Division’s new-founded Innovation Lab. Many of these platforms, however, tend to attract a certain type of leader, namely, the futurist—which places them at risk of turning into self-licking ice cream cones. What these venues lack is an anchor point of deep historical knowledge that prevents them from descending into echo chambers of futurist wish lists where every attendee becomes a hammer in search of a nail.

In the spirit of Dr. Leonard Wong’s “fashion tips for the field grade” paper, there is value in questioning popular assumptions about future war because the evidence suggests that as a species we are not very good at it. Yet certain truths related to the nature of war are timeless. Integrating traditionalists into these events and others, such as digital and physical training domains at the tactical and operational levels, could better position the United States to exploit the creativity shortfalls of its pacing challenge, the PLA.

China’s Creative Capacity Woes

Despite China’s Central Military Commission elevating the status of its Science and Technology Commission in 2020, creativity is not a typical pillar of Beijing’s political system. Historical analyses comparing free nations to authoritarian ones indicate that the latter tend to stifle creativity because they see it as a threat. Divergent thoughts might challenge the legitimacy of the ruling party’s methods. Outside of procuring creativity from western democracies, there is likely a cultural terminus to the PLA’s innovative potential. When coupled with recruiting challenges, a fledgling noncommissioned officer corps, and the Biden administration’s recent embargo on semiconductor sales to China, Beijing’s creative capacity could lead to stagnation at war.

Lacking battlefield experience this century, it is hard to assess China’s ability to wage combined arms warfare, but its highly regimented, top-down command structure may provide clues as to how it would adapt in combat. Indeed, despite China’s efforts to improve its joint military capabilities, the Pentagon’s 2021 report on the matter highlighted several consistent shortcomings, including the inability of Chinese commanders to “understand higher authorities’ intentions” and “manage unexpected situations.”

The war in Ukraine might offer some insight as well, where a similarly rigid leadership model contributed to Russia’s poor performance. A supposedly capable modern army driven by New Generation Warfare and the military mind of Valery Gerasimov struggled in the face of a motivated, well-organized, and well-supported Ukrainian defense. Distributed mission command and flattened communications allowed low-level leaders in the Ukrainian Army to seek out creative solutions and test them in battle. In addition to myriad other problems, the Russian army had trouble adapting to an influx of Western arms packages, the rapid loss of its general officers, and a creative, resilient opponent. These vulnerabilities may not be exclusive to Russia.

Conclusion

The United States is uniquely positioned to use creativity as a mechanism that targets the weaknesses of its pacing challenge. A nexus camp could link futurists and traditionalists in joint force transformation with creativity as its nucleus. The U.S. defense enterprise has the human talent and the organizational capacity to turn creativity into a force multiplier through a program that brings these two camps together.

Finding this balance is critical to operationalizing U.S. strategic documents. It prevents the joint force from running so far ahead of itself that its aspirations become dislocated from reality while maintaining an anchor point in the form of what history tells us is humanly possible. After all, future war conditions are not often apparent until war is present, at which time those in the fight must adapt to them. A creative, well-balanced military that fuses the acumen of prophets and historians will, like the Ukrainian Army, get results on the battlefields of tomorrow.

Michael P. Ferguson is a U.S. Army officer with experience in various combat, staff, and security cooperation assignments throughout Europe, Africa, and the Middle East. His analysis has been featured in more than a dozen publications and he is co-author of a forthcoming military history of Alexander the Great.

Nicholas A. Rife is a U.S. Army senior intelligence technician with a wide range of global intelligence experience. He is currently the Army’s all-source intelligence functional lead and senior technical instructor at the U.S. Army Foundry Platform.

The views expressed in this article are those of the authors alone and do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Army, U.S. Department of Defense, or U.S. government.

Image: Reuters