By the summer of 1978, segments of all the service staffs and many officials in the Department of Defense (DOD) were lamenting the lack of the long-term view in military planning and programming. Two services organized ad hoc groups to study the benefits to be obtained from institutionalizing long-range planning within their staffs. The Air Force was first into the arena with a twenty-officer study group chartered by Secretary John C. Stetson; the Navy followed suit several months later with a smaller effort. The secretary asked his long-range planning study group to:

• examine the feasibility of adopting big business long-range planning techniques;
• recommend an institutionalized long-range planning process, should corporate long-term planning practices appear adoptable;
• offer perspectives on the future world -twenty years out -in which the Air Force will operate; and
• recommend strategy alternatives for meeting future threats and opportunities.

Long-range planning is the systematic process of formulating objectives and developing strategy and resource allocation alternatives for reaching them.

Organizations should plan in order to avoid, to cope with, or to beat threats; in order to exploit opportunities; and to shape the future world--always with the focus on goals. Yet without formal goal and strategy development and systematic treatment of the future consequences of strategy options, the staff and its leadership might remain tied eternally to the present and could lose the future to those who plan for it.

If the long-term view is not adopted, however, improvements will probably be always on the margin, future forces may be well prepared to fight the last war, and tomorrow may be mortgaged to today (or, even worse, to yesterday).

Neither the Air Force nor the Defense Department has systematically defined its long-term objectives or methodically identified the long-range implications of present decisions.

We need to establish a process that forces the future to intrude on the present, and long-range planning will accomplish this.

Without leaders of vision, however, the military could become almost imperceptibly weaker, year by year, because of an entirely natural reluctance to accept short-term degradation in readiness in order to build for the future.

Even with a coherent and usable set of goals to guide strategic planning, the process is still difficult because alternatives have to be evaluated in the face of uncertainty.