ABSTRACT
Anyone trying to predict the future some 30 years hence is verging on the foolish: to guess whether the US, supported by its Western allies, remains the one global superpower, given the size of China and India, or to predict the world’s economic and ecological health, which governs the foreign and defence policy imperatives, is hardly what one would expect of a warship designer and acquisition manager. Such speculation is best left to historians such as Paul Kennedy1 and Francis Fukuyama.2 Instead, what this chapter will do is give a glimpse into some possible technological solutions, but it assumes an awful lot of ‘ifs’.
