The challenge that is defense planning includes: "educated futurology" and the humanities as methodological approaches, futurists and scenarios, trend spotting and defense analysis, the impossibility of science in studying the future, the impossibility of verification by empirical testing of hypotheses, the value of the humanities which are politics, strategy, and history for defense planning, the use and misuse of analogy, learning from history, why and how strategic history works, and recommendations for the Army. What can be learned from history and what cannot are discussed in this analysis.