Contingencies

Abstract

Before United States defense planners started using contingency as a synonym for "war other than World War III," the word had no particular strategic application. It has acquired one because, in the wake of the Soviet collapse, it captured the one-thing-after-another quality of the new security environment. For reasons that surpass understanding, people convinced themselves that the half century of world politics since the end of World War II—during which (to take but one measure of systemic chaos) the number of sovereign states on earth more than tripled—had in fact been a stately progress of bilateralism, in which every difficulty could be parsed as a variation on the theme of Great Power confrontation. Once that confrontation had ended, however, history kept happening. Only now events no longer seemed to be driven by a deeper, unifying logic that could give you some idea of what to expect. The world was suddenly full of contingencies—of things happening because of other things that happened—and the challenge became how to plan, budget, train, procure, and so on, in circumstances in which all problems seemed equally possible, and all scenarios equally uncertain.