The “short arm” of predictive knowledge refers to the principle that while judgements can be made on new policy in the short term, it is impossible to tell the future ramifications of an action. This means that despite the best intentions, no one can tell for certain whether a policy will have positive effects on the future. Because of this it is important that any changes to policy or infrastructure is monitored closely and continuously while possible changes are analyzed. 

An example of this was the IT and Radio rating merger in the Navy’s Submarine force in 2020. Both the Radio and IT divisions were incredibly undermanned throughout the sub force. The Navy wanted to create a work center for electronic warfare. The Navy’s answer was to combine the radio and IT divisions and create 3 work centers within the newly combined division. This only created problems. First, the rating merger didn’t fix the manning issue, it only made it worse. With the addition of an extra work center the amount of work only increased while the amount of bodies stayed the same. On top of that, with more senior divisional leadership coming from radio, a precedent that radio was more important than IT was set. This led to even less time to take care of IT work. This led to huge ramifications for the navy. All of a sudden, a lot of the top system administrators decided to drop separate at the end of their contracts, leaving the navy in an even worse situation when it came to cyber security. Since then they’ve decided to reinstate a proper IT division, but the talent pool has dwindled leaving them worse off that they started. 

Not every decision leads to such ramifications, but this proves why its important to try to look past the short term and ensure you’re making the best decisions possible.