A Response to “A Shot in the Dark”

A Response to “A Shot in the Dark: The Futility of Long-Range Modernization Planning”

by Joseph Purser

Download the Full Article: A Response to “A Shot in the Dark”

A response to A Shot in the Dark: The Futility of Long-Range Modernization Planning by Lieutenant Colonel Eric A. Hollister, published by the Institute for Land Warfare, Association of the U.S. Army.

The premise of A Shot in the Dark is that the operating environment of the future promises to be so complex it will overwhelm any attempt to anticipate it, especially in the long term. Therefore, argues the author, strategic planners should avoid attempts to describe the future and instead pursue incremental improvements to the force based on what they can understand now and in the near term. This attack on long-range force planning is in fact misguided, as it misidentifies the true root cause of previous Army major acquisition program failures — institutional bias. Put another way, the article unintentionally makes the point that Service bias for and against certain military missions overwhelms the ability to objectively develop long term futures studies, and prevents logical force development based on those predictions.

Download the Full Article: A Response to “A Shot in the Dark”

Joe Purser is the Director of a small think tank in the Department of Defense charged with identifying future challenges to the joint force and implications for new concepts and capabilities.

The views presented here are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department of Defense.