p.14 beware of the pretentiously huge idea that purports to explain what
everybody else, supposedly, has been too dumb to grasp... New-sounding terms and phrases, advanced by highly persuasive people
with apparently solid credentials, can usually find a ready audience.
p.15 Alas, the facts are that the future has not happened,
and no amount of planning can make it visible to our gaze today.
p.15 The future is not foreseeable, at least not in a very useful sense.
The challenge is to cope with uncertainty, not try to diminish it. That cannot be done reliably. Such ill-fated
attempts will place us on the road to ruin through the creation of unsound expectations.
p.16 Recall a few of the golden rules of defense planning: (1) Try to make
small mistakes rather than big ones; (2) be adaptable and flexible so that you cope with the troubles your mistakes will certainly
give you; (3) aim to have only minimal regrets in the future.
p.16 flexibility and adaptability... are often the basis for defense planning
when the time, place, and identity of enemies are unknown, or at least uncertain.
p.16-17 Expect to be surprised. To win as a defense planner
is not to avoid surprise. To win is to have planned in such a manner that the effects of surprise do not inflict lethal
damage. The fundamental reason why we can be surprised tends... to be... the consequences of known trends that interact
in unexpected ways, resulting in unanticipated consequences.
p.17 Complexity denies us the ability to predict reliably, so we
need a strategy to cope with complexity, not try to eliminate it. [note to self: put in current paper]
p.17 If we do not understand war after 2,500 years, when will we do so?
p.18 What is most essential for understanding war and strategy is to maintain
the clear conceptual distinction between war and strategy, singular, and wars and strategies, plural.
p.18 the further into the future you try to peer, the fuzzier the
picture becomes.
p.19 We will certainly be surprised in the future, so it is our
task now to try to plan against the effects of some deeply unsettling surprises. The key to victory here is not the
expensive creation of new conceptual, methodological, or electro-mechanical tools of prediction. Rather it is to pursue defense
and security planning on the principles of minimum regrets and considerable flexibility and adaptability.
p.25 Trends and perils come in bundles and interact with nonlinear
consequences... The future is unpredictable, and our present security condition may well become a great deal worse
than it is today.
