The Reflection of Foresight in Defence Policy Making: A Comparative Study of the United Kingdom and the United States

In today’s fast changing security environment, characterised by deep uncertainty and a multitude of threat contingencies, the strategic planning process needs to be more flexible, adaptive and robust. Over the past few decades, the so-called ‘foresight methodology’ has made its entry into the strategy processes of businesses, policy makers and long term defence planning. This study attempts to examine in what way the discourse of publicly available security and defence related future-oriented studies (‘foresights’) are reflected in the security priorities as described in the defence policy of the United States (2006 Quadrennial Defense Review ) and the United Kingdom (2004 Defence White Paper) respectively. The ‘meta-foresight’ approach taken in this study offers a strategic perspective and thematic focus, attempts to identify emerging threats and anticipates uncertainties, prevents a narrow focus and tries to provide a long-term context for strategic defence planning. This study provides an elaborate discussion on foresight, gives more insight on the concept of ‘foresight analysis’, its development and entry into the strategy process of various domains and the way defence currently anticipates the future security environment. It makes clear that it is imperative to acknowledge deep uncertainty in this process and that in strategic (defence) planning the “FAR-principles” of Flexibility, Adaptability and Robustness have to be upheld. Different insights from the academic literature eventually lead to the normative assumption that the use of foresight analysis should be reflected in the formulation of the defence policy of the U.K. and the U.S. To assess whether this is actually the case for the British and U.S.’ defence policy, a large amount of future-oriented studies (‘foresights’) in the field of security and defence, focusing on the United Kingdom and United States, was collected. Furthermore, the structure of the defence policy of both the U.K. and U.S. and the thematic security priority areas have been discussed. The research – policy making nexus is an important element in this discussion as well, since it provides more insight on the way research results are used in the policy making process, hence the creation of ‘evidence-based policy’. This nexus seems hard to uncover, because the actual interaction process between these two worlds is difficult to determine and could, therefore, not provide for hard evidence. To analyse the large datasets for both the U.S. as well the U.K. in an efficient, apolitical and unbiased manner, the text mining program ‘Text Analyst’ was used. Text mining has slowly made its intrusion into the analytical toolbox of strategic planners and is capable of analysing large amounts of unstructured data in a comprehensible and efficient way. For the purposes of this study it provided Executive Summary an excellent opportunity to use it and offer a new approach in the public policy field. In the filtering phases after the text mining analysis, the data analysis program Tableau Software and several other visualisation methods have been used. It follows that most priority areas covered in the defence policy of both countries are consistent with the outcomes of the foresight discourse. The text mined defence policy documents also seem very coherent with the thematic priority areas as explicitly stated in the defence White Papers, suggesting a ‘proof of concept’ of the text mining tool. With regard to the U.S. dataset, all the priority areas of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review come back in the text mining results, albeit in different terminology, but with the same content. Themes such as ‘Shifting Power Structures’ and ‘Energy Security’ are, however, not part of the priority areas of the 2006 QDR, while they are regarded as very important for the future defence landscape of the U.S. These 2006 QDR priority areas are formulated rather broadly, thus making it difficult to assess whether a more specific security theme falls under one of these broad policy areas. Overall, the U.S. discourse focuses more on the ‘hard’ issues, i.e. terms like military, army, warfare, terrorism, enemy and weapon, and has significantly higher scores than the U.K. dataset. With regard to the U.K. dataset, the text mining results also show a considerable overlap with the most important themes expressed in the 2004 Defence White Paper. However, contrary to the 2006 QDR, the British defence policy describes much more specific thematic areas of importance – the so-called Strategic Trends. This made the comparison effort somewhat easier, because the text mining results were also rather specific. Nonetheless, some themes are not touched upon or just barely mentioned in the 2004 White Paper, such as ‘Energy Security’, ‘Nature & Environment’ and ‘Health Issues’, while these are seen as very important future issues for U.K. defence. Overall, the U.K. discourse focuses more on the ‘soft’ issues, i.e. terms like energy, environment, health, emission and greenhouse has significantly higher scores compared to the U.S. dataset. In this study several recommendations are made concerning the potential of text mining applications for data analysis, a more thorough analysis of the actual use of foresight analysis in today’s defence policy formulation and the need for further research on the basic interaction process between the research community and policy world in the defence domain. Together, these recommendations aim to improve the establishment of good strategic foresight processes in defence policy making. The various foresight programs in the public and private sector can provide important insights, but also the way ‘the art of the long view’ can be brought into the policy process. This should lead to more flexible, adaptive and robust strategic defence planning, which is imperative in today’s fast changing, highly uncertain security environment.