Capabilities-Based Planning in the Coming Global Security Environment: A Paper for the Monterey Strategy Seminar of 21 September 2004

Capabilities-based planning is advertised as the new approach to planning in the Department of Defense. A simple definition of such planning would be that it should be threat-less and scenario-less. Unfortunately, the new defense planning system requires that the planning be tested in what are essentially "vertical" scenarios, i.e., spikes in time, and this leads to the invention of enemies and threats to fill the scenarios. The main drawback in this is that it is hard to apply such planning to the "horizontal" scenarios the United States now faces, especially the global war on terror, which is expected to last a long time.