A Guest post from Martin over at the Fantasy Fleets blog
If we look at the past 50 years and extrapolate over the next 50 years we can see some clear trends emerging that will lead to opportunities and challenges for the future.
First Trend
Developing nations such as China, Brazil, Indonesia and India will continue to grow their economies. This means the little post World War II club on the Security Council will look increasingly irrelevant. China and the USA can be assured of maintaining their positions however Russia, France and the United Kingdom all look to be getting their hats in the next 15-20 years.
However from a strictly economic point of view old blighty’s position does not look that bad. One thing that the UK has that none of our compatriots has is a growing population. The UK will have the largest economy in Europe by 2050 if German population continues to decline. Russia’s population is collapsing faster than anyone’s and with its relatively low per capita GDP it may also find it difficult to maintain a seat at the top table. While we can’t maintain a top 5 slot for much longer economically we should be able to maintain a place in the top 10 for the next 50 years. We should also be able to maintain a top 5 position in military spending for much of the next 50 years.
In 50 years we will be operating in a multi polar environment with numerous super powers, a position very much like that of the late 19th and early 20thCentuary.
Second Trend
By 2050 global populations will likely begin to peak around the 9 billion mark. The main problem we will face is resource constraint. While we can grow enough food to feed all these people we cannot produce enough energy and resources to give them all the same standard of living I enjoy today. While we have lots of oil and hydrocarbons the rate we can extract them at is limited. In the past decade 200 million Chinese people stopped cycling bikes and started driving cars. Oil prices went from $10 a barrel to $140 a barrel. What’s going to happen when the other 1.1 billion Chinese people decide they want to drive a car as well?
One of three things is likely to happen to address this:
One, the world comes up with a magical source of new cheap energy and we can go on as we do today.
Two, China will try to grab the resources it needs forcing us and the rest of the world to defend them.
Three, the big boys will decide that it’s not really fair that a few hundred thousand Arabs are sitting on the mother load and decide to divvy it up amongst themselves. At which point we really need to make sure we are one of the big boys and we get a slice of the pie.
The neutral model followed by countries such as Sweden worked well in a world where NATO ensured the peace and there was more than enough to go around. However it did not work well in the pre-World War I environment and it is likely to not work well in the middle to later 21st Century.
Who is to say that nations will not revert back to empire building? Who is to say that new powers like China, India and Brazil will be as magnanimous as the USA today or Britain in the past? We can ill afford to unilaterally disarm in a world with so much uncertainty.
Third Trend
Technology will continue to develop and developing nations will catch up with us. This will lead to a number of different developments. Information technology will continue to grow and alter our lives in ways we cannot yet imagine. Who would have thought five years ago that Facebook could be responsible for toppling half the dictators in the Middle East?
As developing societies gain more access to information technology they are likely to become more democratic and more unstable leading to dozens of revolutions. Extremist groups are also likely to become more prevalent as they gain the ability to spread their message to a large badly educated audience.
Defence technology is also likely to change. We will rely more and more on Robots be they UAV’s, UUV’s or land based autonomous platforms.
We will also have to accept that the silver bullet solution of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) backed by undefeatable ICBM’s will not last forever. Missile Defence is a reality today. Imagine its capability in 50 years’ time. We have not had an unlimited state on state war for 66 years exactly the same amount of time we have had Nuclear Weapons. A world were Nuclear weapons no longer guarantee the peace will be a more dangerous one. We will likely have to invest heavily in missile defence at some point and we may have to consider increases in conventional forces.
We will also have to be prepared to maintain our independent nuclear capability and it may also be necessary to increase it in order to achieve the same effect. If China can intercept ICBM’s then we can’t expect that a total of 8 or 16 missiles are enough to provide a credible deterrent.
Fourth Trend
We may also have to face up to environmental change over the next 50 years with global warming leading to droughts, famines and other natural disasters. This topic is a favourite of the power point warrior gazing into the future. I do not want to put too much emphasis on it though. Most of these natural disasters if they do happen will happen in desperately poor countries with little in the way of resources. While it is only right that we do our part in providing humanitarian aid we must avoid the notion that we will send in the marines or anyone else to fix the problem or end a civil war. Civil war like it or not is a part of human development. We can’t stop it. It will likely continue to happen for 100 years or more until all nations reach a European level of development. It’s the oldest rule in the book that no outside military force should become involved in a civil war but it is one our politicians and military leaders keep forgetting.
If we can intervene in a small scale way as with Sierra Leone to support a democratic government or provide air cover for civilians as we did in Libya then we should. But our experience over the past 10 years has shown us that large scale ground forces on permanent deployment are not the answer. The Army is not a police force. We would never accept using it as such in our own country.
Why would we try to do this in other people’s countries?
Given these relative certainties we should be able to conduct our foreign and military policy today in a way that is likely to benefit us greatly when the time that we really need it comes. We have done this in the past and it served us well. If it had not been for major diplomatic efforts made towards the end of the 19th Century would America have entered not one but two world wars on our side? Don’t forget we went to war with the USA twice and almost entered their civil war on the confederate side. We were hardly natural allies. We must make a concerted effort to identify the future super powers of the world today and make every effort to develop relationships with them as close as the relationship we share with the USA at present.
In the race to position ourselves for the future we have two major advantages over anyone else.
Firstly we know we are crap and can’t really do anything on our own. We realise we are not a super power and never will be. This means that we can be far more flexible in our dealings with other nations than for instance the United States can be. Our fore fathers realised this as well. Where possible we always built coalitions to attack our enemies. Be it for mutual defence against Napoleon or for mutual benefit as against Russia in the 1850’s.
Secondly most of the major players like us and trust us. We have excellent relations with the USA and the European Union who will still be the dominant economic forces in the world of 2050. We have decent relations with India and Brazil as well as a host of other major developing nations.
This allows us to form coalitions with a wide group on nations. Countries will allow us basing rights and provide us with support because unlike China they do not feel we will later attempt to colonise them.
It makes a change to read something that approaches the defence problem through the lens of realism and not the abstract one of liberalism.
Civilian casualties are unavoidable in war. The West does its best to mitigate collateral damage; I sincerely believe that to be a fact. But I am not sure the Chinese will be so particular. It will be a shock to the West when if conflict comes with China the latter happily target infrastructure without concern for the well being of the civilians within the vicinity of their targets.
“Who is to say that new powers like China, India and Brazil will be as magnanimous as the USA today or Britain in the past? We can ill afford to unilaterally disarm in a world with so much uncertainty.”
As X notes above; hand-wringing by todays superpowers over the proportionate use of force may turn out to have been a an temporary aberration that by chance occurred as we crossed from one millenium to another, and not a permanent change of state.
@ Jedi and X – Thanks for your comments. I do think we forget some times that developing nations have a very different view to what we have. Much of our moral code is based on experience. We can’t forget our Grandparents use to fly 1000 bombers a night to blow the hell out of European cities seeking to kill the largets number of civilians possible. That was just over 60 years ago. Many nations like China really don’t think as we do.
For the record: ‘Countries’ are already building new empires. The fact, that Myanmar is slowly opening to western influence is due to the chinese being almost in possession of half of the country.
As we speak, there are around 3m chinese ‘workers’ abroad, spanning from Tonga, to Botswana to South America. They have simply bought the local elite, a pattern similar to ealry british imperial efforts. It’s stage one.
Re. national code and experience: we tend to view history from our perspective, but does it tell us the truth? The truth is, that until 1800, the UK was never able to field armies as large as the Koreans and Japanese did in 1593. The truth is, that Korea was as capable in gunfounding at that time as England. The Taiping revolution in China in the 19th century cost more lives than both world wars combined. Maos great leap forward is estimated to have killed more than 30m people.
Re. climate change: you do know, that Beijing is being hit by sandstorms each year, getting worse and worse? You do know, that China as a whole has huge salinisation problems, directly leading to famines in the long run? You know of the garbage-maelstrom in the pacific, which will become a huge problem for the fishery, itself being the single main protein-source for Asians apart from soy-beans? Environmental problems will hit not only unimportant countries, they will directly hit the most populous countries as well.
@ McZ – I agree that all nations will be hit by environmental disasters – The USA with Hurricanes, China with droughts and Europe with floods. However we will be able to deal with them on our own. I think the current woolly liberal future planning assumptions of the Army being called on to go into some where that’s experiencing a famine or drought is wrong.
Not to put too harsh a point on it but if some where is too poor and too stupid to look after its own people it’s probably not a place we want to do business. If we don’t want to do business there then we should not be investing billions in bringing stability to the place.
Martin – I think the series is good so far, and your making salient points, however you seem to take the naked self interest a little too far with:
“I think the current woolly liberal future planning assumptions of the Army being called on to go into some where that’s experiencing a famine or drought is wrong.”
Why ? UK like all current top tier industrialized nations that had to learn by trial and error has been polluting the planet and contributing (heavily) to global warming far longer than the up and comers. So why would it be wrong to to use military medics, engineers and so far in a disaster relief operation in a “poor country where we really don’t want to do business” ?
Facebook by the way is not a good example of modern Information and Communications Technologies changing the world – facebook, twitter, private bulletin boards, whatever…. they are all just channels, the real enable is / was the massive explosion in ownership of mobile (cell) phones, particularly “smart” phones with the ability to access social networks as well as email and SMS.
Actually I reckon with 50 years safe nuclear fusion in the form of Liquid Fuel Thorium Reactors (LFTR) could have solved the energy issues, and hydro-carbon fuel dependency – but food could be whole other issue ! Both growing it, and distributing it.
@ Jed
If we had safe nuclear power why does it mean we couldn’t grow or distribute food as easily as we do now?
The biggest problem would be finding substitutes for fertilisers who chemistry is dependent on hydrocarbons. And there is already a substantial amount of work going onto bridge the gap.
With fusion even somewhere as small Britain could become self-sufficient in food.
just to back jed up there. “I think the current woolly liberal future planning assumptions of the Army being called on to go into some where that’s experiencing a famine or drought is wrong.”
well i’m sitting here drinking me fairtrade cup of tea, supplied from Rwanada, a country who is now in the commonwealth. Aid provided by british army via the UN was a success, just a shame the MOD PR team and the british press didn’t think so. The british were highly rated by the african nations who also helped this improved our standing with those resource rich countries, sometimes it’s the bigger picture
I think the idea is the West arrives before the genocide to stop it and not drinks tea grown by the survivors.
x
“The biggest problem would be finding substitutes for fertilisers who chemistry is dependent on hydrocarbons. And there is already a substantial amount of work going onto bridge the gap.”
And if you need less for fuel, you use more for that, but actually what I meant, and did not explain at all, was that climate change, population migration, top soil loss, over fertilization etc etc – all in all, I think food COULD be a bigger problem than energy – but maybe in 50 years palatable protein will be “test tube” grown.
@ Jed
Forgive me for saying this but you are not thinking this all the way through.
If you have electric to cheap to meter it opens up all sorts of possibilities. You could grow say wheat indoors in a totally controlled environment. You would be able to crop 3 times a year what ever the weather. You could have multi-storey fields. Water wouldn’t be a problem because you could desalinate it and pump it from the sea. Top soil not a problem. You could have wheat fields in the middle of cities. Once you have limitless cereals animal feed isn’t a problem. I am not a fan of intensive animal farming but you have the likes of pigs living again in warm spacious multi-storey field too. Their bodily gasses trapped before they enter the atmosphere and broken down easily because you have unlimited electric. All those specialist vegetables and fruits that are flown into the UK could be grown here. Green fish farms.
Fusion isn’t just about keeping the lights on.
A house cost a few thousand in raw materials and labour. But they are worth hundreds of thousands. So what makes people think that cheap energy will be cheap?
Did you post that Phil via a dial up 300 baud modem at a 50p a minuter? Or from an all you can eat data plan on your smart phone at £15 a month?
What I mean to say is plenty of things are cheap but we don’t pay cost price. Even if electricity was effectively limitless and cheap to generate its not going to be as cheap as it should be for the consumer. It doesn’t cost my insurance company 25 quid to print and send me a copy of my policy but I can’t get it any other way. It will be the same with such energy.
And I posted from an iPhone 4 on an O2 plan which isn’t at all unlimited.
@ Jed I agree that our self-interest is often contained in the common good. However I just don’t feel that it means us having to take on a disproportionate level of the burden. I probably made too much of self interest in an attempt to make my point. I am all for sending in Engineers and medics to help with famines of droughts. I even support small scale military operations like Sierra Leone. However before committing to any type of military campaign we have to ask is the effort justified on an economic scale. Take Afghanistan as an example.
Is it worth while having a stable Afghanistan? Yes
Is it worth spending $120 billion per year for 15 years? No
Imagine the type of R&D we could have done in to fusion energy research with upwards of $1 trillion. Would that have made the world a safer and better place than a stable Afghanistan? Yes
I might feel differently if I even thought we could achieve the goal of a safe stable Afghanistan without the Taliban however I just can’t imagine a set of circumstance in the next few years that will see that happen.
In terms of Fusion power if we could produce electricity too cheap to meter we could solve almost every problem we have. However this was the promise of nuclear fission at the start. We still have to build the plants distribute the electricity and produce fuel. None of that will be cheap. We will still face scarcity issues. This is assuming that commercial Nuclear fusion is even possible (fingers crossed it is)
In terms of historic pollution and global warming – Yes we need to play our part. A part we are already playing. We produce 50% less CO2 than the average American and only double what the average Chinese person does even though we produce 10 times more than they do. We along with Europe are preparing to cut C02 by 80% up to 2050 while India and China plan to pump out as much as they can. They can say that we benefited from cheap fossil fuel when we industrialised which is true however they benefit today from all that technology we developed during our period of industrialisation. From Electric power to jet engines they get all that R&D for free. Let’s face it R&D they would never have been able to do for centauries to come if we had not done it first.
Part 2 Second Trend,’China will try and grap the resources it needs………
Sorry this process has already started, at the moment Chinese government corporations have being buying slices in numerous 2nd line resource companies in Australia, they are also very active in new resource developments in Africa. At the moment is money, not military force is their tool but there have already been harsh words between the Chinese and Australian governments over foreign investment in Australian resource projects.
Also, Chinese need for resources is having another impact, the growth of the chinese merchant marine. Just as the RN grew to protect and enhance the UK merchant fleet, the growth in in the chinese merchant marine is drawing the Chinese navy out onto the trade routes.
@ Aussie Johnno – I have no issue with China resourting to peaceful measn of aquiring resources. However the issue in the world of 2050 where not the 200 million Chinese middle classs of today but 1 billion plus will be requiring resources will be a very different story. There simply is not enough to go around. I think we have to be prepared in that type of world to defend those resources.
Shale natural gas is a current example of an inverted energy shock – Russians, for example, very much not happy about the prospect of the UK ending up exporting gas backwards down the pipeline.
If current trends continue, wind and solar installed capacity will exceed the forecast energy demand sometime in the 2030s. Upshots: disruption (to say the least) to energy exporters, pissed off Russians, relieved Chinese, happy anybody who makes the bits, unhappy anybody who has to licence the patents.
Agree with the trends. My tuppence worth for what it is worth:
China is facing significant social problems. The Chinese govt admits to 16,000 mass protests last year – that is what it admits to… The combination of increasing social and economic aspirations, increased freedom of information and an unaccountable and corrupt state with a shrinking workforce is going to lead to issues.
India will overtake China as the most populous state by 2025. However their inefficient and corrupt legal and executive systems will increasingly hamper their ability to capitalise on their potential.
If governments cannot meet their population’s expectations then shocks will occur.
Climate change may threaten food or energy supplies and may well cause significant population movements leading to instability.
Societies will continue to change as social media and communications technology chage. There is a danger that societies will fragment as people become virtual communities leading to a decline in social cohesion.