The Ministry of Defence has published a 30-year view of the future, designed to inform the “future strategic context” of the UK armed forces. It is an update of the trends analysis conducted by the UK Foreign Office and Ministry of Defence for the Strategic Defence Review in 1998. The approach is a reasonably rigorous internationally-oriented external scan, of current trends and emerging issues, filtered for issues which are – from an MoD perspective – likely to affect UK security. This does mean that the overall tone is pessimistic, though.

The original work took a view to 2015. The new report has been extended to 30 years largely because much military equipment is designed and procured on a 30 year timescale.

The Guardian had a news story (“Revolution, flashmobs, and brain chips. A grim vision of the future” by Richard Norton Taylor) on the front page on Easter Monday which summarised it.

The full 90 page report can be found here. I may come back to this later.