On April 11, 2001, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld sent a memo to President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney. “I ran across this piece on the difficulty of predicting the future,” Rumsfeld wrote. “I thought you might find it interesting.”9 The “piece” looks at the strategic situation at the start of each decade between 1900 and 2000 and shows that, in every case, the reality was a stunning change from ten years earlier. “All of which is to say that I’m not sure what 2010 will look like,” concluded its author, Linton Wells, “but I’m sure that it will be very little like what we
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