Who Will We—and They—be on Day 30 or Day 1000 in Deterrence?

Author: Dr. Nicholas Wright (Intelligent Biology)

This publication was released as part of the SMA project “21st Century Strategic Deterrence Frameworks.” (SDF) For more information regarding this project, please click here.

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The Joint Concept for Competing (JCC; Feb 2023) states that a ‘competitive mindset also means embracing strategic competition as a persistent and enduring national security challenge.’ That requires anticipating future change as adversaries respond to us, and we to them. Iteration. Yet although potential futures rapidly become impossibly numerous to analyse, and are in many ways unprestatable, we can identify regularities significant for deterrence planning.

Humans are notoriously bad, for example, at anticipating their own decision-making in the future. Not only do human preferences and perceptions change over time, but specific actions like going to war reliably change them in ways that humans systematically ignore. Planners often anticipate that a ‘war will be over by Christmas’—and yet once thousands have died on each side preferences change.
Thus, here we ask: How can we put ourselves in the shoes of our adversaries—and of ourselves—on Day 30, Day 100, or Day 1000 of deterrence operations?

We combine the latest evidence from neuroscience and artificial intelligence (AI) with psychology, business, intelligence analysis and other disciplines. This identifies operationalizable ways that analysts and strategists can: (1) better forecast decision calculus assessments; and (2) integrate these decision calculi within a new conception of planning for deterrence—and influence more broadly—in campaigns.

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