The Chinese central government will slowly and steadily lose authority while regional armies [gain power]. The Western powers are going to take sides to protect their investments - they have put billions of dollars into Shanghai. Their fear is that [these investments] are going to be expropriated by a warlord from the interior who will sweep down on Shanghai. They will try to form alliances with warlords to protect their concessions, and there will be a huge flow of weapons into China.
George FriedmanA research division develops marketing material for its deal makers. We have no policy position. If you have a policy position you can't possibly forecast.
George FriedmanIn a way, we can have a much easier discussion about the future of technology than we can about why a young man kills another man in a war.
George FriedmanBy the 20th century, war ceased to be an encounter between two armies. It became an encounter between two societies, because a factory worker producing a gun or a bomb is as deadly as a pilot.
George FriedmanWhat is revolutionary today is that we're using precision-guided munitions. And instead of building individual weapons, we are building an industry and a philosophy, the culture of precision. You saw Desert Storm. Precision works.
George FriedmanThere is a radical and unprecedented shift [in war] that is part of the general transformation of civilization. First, understand that the past 150 years of warfare are totally unprecedented in that we introduced a breathtakingly inefficient technology: guns. In the First World War, and this is not an exaggeration, it took 10,000 rounds of ammunition to kill one person. Any given shot had a one in 10,000 probability of ending someone's life.
George FriedmanThe first thing you have to do is understand what success looks like. And to understand what success looks like you have to understand the intent. If you understand that intent is to make sure the sea lines are secure, then suddenly bombing Kosovo makes sense, because you don't want Serbia to reemerge as a major power.
George Friedman