Civil-Military Relations, c. 2030

Raphael Cohen, a former Army intelligence officer and friend of the Center for Defense Studies, now pursuing a PhD  at Georgetown, has penned an excellent piece in World Affairs on the prospective course of the civil-military (and inter-service) dialogue over the next twenty years. He’s taken a creative tack in doing so. Here’s the introduction:

The year is 2030 and four leaders-two military, two civilian-sit around a table at the White House or the Pentagon, perhaps, or at a military headquarters or embassy halfway around the world. One is an Army general, an infantryman by trade, who has spent his entire thirty-year-plus career rotating to and from the war zones of what was once called the Global War on Terror and then changed during the Obama administration to the more anodyne Overseas Contingency Operations. The second is an Air Force general, a former fighter pilot who has spent his recent years focusing on more conventional threats, among them how to deal with rogue states via airpower. The third is a Foreign Service officer who has spent much of his career engrossed in the political and economic side of irregular warfare, sometimes embedded with the military, other times manning a remote diplomatic outpost in some hostile precinct. The fourth is a more traditional political appointee: well educated and well connected, he has spent most of his career outside government, but very much inside the Washington world of policy debates.

The participants in this hypothetical meeting exemplify four very different types of leaders, who, if current trends continue, will all be coming to prominence and power by 2030. All come to the table with institutional biases; all boast strong, Type A personalities. None of them come from the same background; none of them speak the same language.

Read the rest here.