By James Clinch

A child taking its first steps as the Soviet empire was breaking apart would barely have reached school age when MP Tony Blair charged the UK Defence Forum with 'thinking the unthinkable' on defence and security. Yet in that short space of time the pace of change was such that his radical appeal already had the ring of pragmatism. Verities that had guided strategic thinking for decades were, in the post-Cold War context and amidst contending images of the future, increasingly suspected of being outmoded. After the dramatic events of 2001 they were, it seemed, potentially even dangerous.

The drive to transcend conventional wisdom has only intensified since. U.S. General Martin E. Dempsey used this year's Kermit Roosevelt Lecture to warn against 'the failure of imagination' in respect of defence issues, and just last year respected analyst Joshua Cooper Ramo, managing director of Kissinger Associates, released a book declaring ours nothing less than the 'Age of the Unthinkable', urging a degree of mental dexterity commensurate to the bewildering complexity that he argues now defines the strategic realm. Ramo's work is merely the culmination of a trend: drop a line into any stream of the literature on defence and security over the past fifteen years and one is almost certain to catch a reference to the need to radically revise our thinking. But if the revelation of fresh ideas is now a commonplace, if the search for unorthodoxy is itself becoming orthodox, exactly what 'thinking the unthinkable' means is becoming increasingly hard to determine.