Alternate Futures for 2020 (1994)

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SPACECAST 2020 was a chief of staff of the Air Force directed space study, challenged to
identify and conceptually develop high-leverage space technologies and systems that will best
support the war fighter in the twenty-first century. The study was composed of officers, airmen,
and civilians from institutions within Air University and assisted by outside advisory groups
made up of the Air Force major command vice commanders, senior retired military officers and
distinguished civilians, and technical experts throughout the Department of Defense and
civil/commercial laboratories. This is the third of four monographs:
Executive Summary, The
SPACECAST 2020 Process, The World of 2020
and
Alternative Futures, and Operational
Analysis.
DISCLAIMER
SPACECAST 2020 was a study done in compliance with a directive from the chief of staff, Air Force to examine the
capabilities and technologies for 2020 and beyond to preserve the security of the US. Presented on 22 June 1994,
this report was produced in the Department of Defense school environment in the interest of academic freedom and
the advancement of national defense-related concepts. The views expressed in this report are those of the authors
and do not reflect the official policy or position of the United States Air Force, Department of Defense, or the United
States government.
THE WORLD OF 2020
AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES
Air University• Air Education and Training Command• United States Air Force
Maxwell Air Force Base, Alabama
The World of 2020
and Alternative Futures
If a man does not give thought to problems which are still
distant, he will be worried by them when they
come nearer.
-Confucius
Defining the distant future is a hazardous enterprise. One is invariably wrong on many
counts. Failing to consider the future is even more hazardous. It leads you to engage in the
wrong enterprise with invalid or irrelevant objectives, only to fail to achieve your desired results
while continually being buffeted by unanticipated events and unintended consequences. What
follows is a look into the distant future constructed by military officers as a backdrop for their
exploration of ideas about the United States space activity circa 2020.
SPACECAST 2020 is the name of the study. One hundred fourteen officers and civilians
attending the Air Command and Staff College and the Air War College at Maxwell Air Force
Base, Alabama, during the 1993-1994 academic year conducted the study. Gen Merrill A.
McPeak, the chief of staff of the Air Force, requested the study. The study chair was the
commander of Air University, Lt Gen Jay W. Kelley. Under General Kelleys supervision, Air
University personnel devised the process to produce new ideas and executed the study to produce
and validate those ideas.
1
All this had to be accomplished within the confines of the Air
University academic year and be completed by June 1994. The guidance required that the study:
(1) be characterized by unconstrained creativity, (2) remain detached from redefining service
organizational structures or redefining the assigned roles and missions of the armed forces, (3) be
centered on generating a vision of the military space capabilities our country would require in the
far future, and (4) not interfere with the core curricula of any of the Air University colleges.
Although not part of the study's original mandate, General Kelley created two oversight groups
apart from the Air University to advise the study participants and evaluate their progress and
findings. General Kelley defined a key requirement of his role as study chair as being the only
person involved in the study with the power to say no.
As the study group began exploring new ideas and learning about creativity, space, and the
future, they quickly concluded that a clear consensus about the future environment was critical to
the realistic evaluation of new concepts and technologies. Assumptions about the SPACECAST
2020 world needed to be explicit for effective planning. As the study group set about forging a
consensus about the future, some participants raised concerns about the potential for stifling
creativity and increasing the risk of being wrong by planning around a single view of the future.
To reduce the risks of either being fuzzy or being wrong, the study group developed multiple
visions and sets of crystallized assumptions. The study group developed a most likely future, the
SPACECAST world view, and several alternate futures.
Creating Views of the Future
The SPACECAST 2020 method of creating a realistic set of planning horizons blended
expert opinion with unbiased, critical analysis and synthesis. While a few of the participants had
graduate education in strategic planning and corporate-level experience, most were bright
operators -- technical experts in the application of military power. These operators needed to be
educated about the future. SPACECAST 2020 exposed the participants to futurists, scientists,
science fiction writers, Hollywood screen writers, as well as political, economic, social, and
technology experts. Since the visions, projections, and data from these experts often conflicted,
the participants were empowered to extract the most persuasive insights.
To synthesize the complex and discordant perspectives on 2020 and beyond, participant groups
constructed independent glimpses of the world of 2020 from which common salient features
were extracted. Fourteen groups sifted through the data and developed brief presentations
depicting their ideas about the operating environment of 2020. A senior group of participants
evaluated the substantive merits of each projection and elicited the common, highly likely
assumptions. The group then forged a consensus world view, which was presented to all
participants and iterated several times. The SPACECAST 2020 world view captured the most
likely environment for US activity related to space in the future and became the planning basis
for the study's concept and technology generation and assessment.
While the SPACECAST 2020 world view captured the dominant features of the expected future,
the SPACECAST 2020 assumptions omitted some highly stressful potential events and
circumstances. The participants referred to some of these variant disasters and contrasting
frames of reference as the rogue set. Most agreed that the events in the rogue set were too
improbable to form the basis for the study or US policy, yet they were too interesting to ignore.
Fascination with the rogue set and some of its potential consequences sparked recognition that
unusual, high impact events could be so disruptive that they warranted further consideration.
The participants decided that alternate future worlds were needed to bound the risk associated
with concentrating on a single or unitary view of the more likely future events. Alternate future
scenarios also held promise as a tool for judging the robustness of new concepts and technologies
generated in the study.
Developing Alternate Future Worlds
To supplement the SPACECAST 2020 assumptions about the future, eight participants and
two consultants from The Futures Group developed a series of alternative futures.
2
Alternate
futures, alternate worlds, or scenarios are terms used interchangeably in strategic planning in this
study. Scenarios, intended for use as background for planning and assessing alternate strategic
courses of action, are descriptions of future conditions. To be effective, scenarios or alternate
futures must have several key ingredients (fig.
1).
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