In this paper, I will develop a slightly different approach that instead assumes that the future is path-dependent. This approach allows for a greater impact of agency and can be easily summed up as what happens in 2030 depends upon what we do in 2029, and what happens in 2029 depends upon what we do in 2028, and so on. Agency thus becomes crucial for shaping the future. Moreover, rather than focusing on actions, in this paper, I will primarily focus on norms. Norms change only gradually and slowly and are therefore a more promising baseline than current actions. Specifically, I will focus on norms of political order: about what it means to govern and be governed, how we understand the relationship between the public and private, and the concepts of civil and military. This paper is structured as follows. First, I will briefly discuss current patterns in war and warfare to evaluate whether or not there are trends that can be discerned. This part of the paper is based on the second approach and it serves a springboard to begin to think differently about the future. Throughout the paper, I will use the trends as a point of departure. Second, I will begin with a discussion on what we already know about the future. In doing so, I will critically engage with the NIC documents Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World and Tomorrow’s Security Challenges: The Defence Implications of Emerging Global Trends. In short, my critique will stress the lack of attention given to ideational factors. Third, and finally, I will suggest ideationally driven scenarios and identify the challenges to such a development of war and warfare.
In Western operations in Afghanistan, small European powers escalate in different ways. While Denmark and the Netherlands have contributed to Western escalation through integration with British and US forces, Norway and Sweden have done so by creating a division of labour allowing US and British combat forces to concentrate their efforts in the south. These variations in strategic behaviour suggest that the strategic choice of small powers is more diversified than usually assumed. We argue that strategic culture can explain the variation in strategic behaviour of the small allies in Afghanistan. In particular, Dutch and Danish internationalism have reconciled the use of force in the national and international domains, while in Sweden and Norway there is still a sharp distinction between national interest and humanitarianism.
The prevailing explanation of the institutionalization of the principles of war is misleading. Although the introduction of the principles into Western doctrine coincided with total war and the need to train unprecedented numbers of soldiers and junior officers in tactics, the fact that the principles disappeared from doctrines immediately prior to and during the Second World War suggests that they were not institutionalized to meet an increased need to educate the military. Instead, we test two other explanations: one drawing on the principles’ military effectiveness and one drawing upon the principles’ explanatory power. We find that neither one of these hypotheses stand. Instead, we conclude by elaborating on how the institutionalization of the principles of war can be made understandable using non-rationalist frameworks, in particular the growth of a particular kind of identity of staff officers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. According to this framework, the two world wars interrupted—rather than promoted—the institutionalization of the principles, since the wars with their large death tolls and mass recruitment increased the difficulties of creating a separate and unique identity for the burgeoning corps of staff officers.