Defence
Strategic Trends
Strategic Trends provides a measure of context and coherence in an uncertain predictive area characterised by risk, ambiguity and change.
Understanding the Future Strategic Environment
The need for Defence to examine the future strategic context was articulated in the Strategic Defence Review (1998).
This confirmed the long-term nature of Defence planning and the requirement for comprehensive understanding of the complex strategic environment.
The DCDC approach goes beyond identifying the potential future military threats, to which our Armed Forces will have to respond, and looks at the developments in areas that will shape the wider strategic context within which Defence will have to interact.
Defence decisions about how to act and react in relation to these issues are considered over time with an appropriate balance of judgement and risk, and take time to form and implement.
The consequences of these decisions tend to endure for some time. Weapon systems and platforms can take more than 15 years to design and acquire and may be retained in service for 20-30 years.
Similarly, the development of long term Defence relationships, post conflict peace-building and achieving the long-term personnel requirements of the Armed Forces, are all long-term activities.
In addition, in terms of value for money and strategic resilience, Defence has to make a prudent assessment of those capabilities the Armed Forces will need to sustain a consistently credible military posture over time, while allowing some flexibility for the unexpected and rapid change.
One of the strengths of Strategic Trends assessment is its independence from routine staffing and wider Defence decision-making.
This helps ensure its objectivity, intellectual rigour and freedom from accusations of compromise, lobby-group pressure or partiality. Consequently Strategic Trends work is able to inform Defence decisions, without being constrained by fashion or received wisdom.
Some of the findings of Strategic Trends will, therefore, challenge views which derive from existing or transient circumstances, rather than from long wave trends from the enduring features of the strategic context.
Strategic Trends presents an understanding of the changes likely to take place during the next 30 years, by considering major trend-based outcomes in 5 dimensions:
- Resource
- Social
- Political
- Science and Technology
- Military
Page rated 1 times
