Decisions to authorize military force can have profound implications for a nation. Scenario analysis is useful, but how can nonmilitary factors be included in defense planning? The authors distinguish between political-strategic and military decisions, explain why scenario analysis to support political-strategic decisions is dubious, and note findings about crisis and war variables that can be incorporated into science-based structured scenarios.

Science-Based Scenario Design

A Proposed Method to Support Political-Strategic Analysis

Timothy R. Heath, Matthew Lane

ResearchPublished Feb 18, 2019

Among the most important types of decisions that confront decisionmakers and defense planners are those that commit a nation to conflict, calibrate the use of force to achieve overall strategic goals, and de-escalate a crisis situation in a manner consistent with political objectives. Decisions that authorize a dramatic initiation or escalation of force can carry profound implications for a nation's economy, strategic situation, or survival. Scenario-based analysis remains the most developed and useful tool to support such decisionmaking, but the lack of guidance on how to incorporate nonmilitary factors has often resulted in scenarios that suffer problems of opaque methodology, unsupported assumptions, and implausibility.

In this report, the authors aim to achieve four things. First, they distinguish between political-strategic and military decisions in the work of defense planning. Second, they explain why the current approach to employing scenario analysis to support political-strategic decisions is problematic. Third, they argue that recent findings in social science regarding variables related to crises and wars offer the potential to remedy these defects and aid the development of scenarios that are more rigorous, transparent, and politically realistic. Finally, the authors show how analysts can incorporate these factors into more-holistic and more-realistic assumptions through a process that generates "science-based structured scenarios." To illustrate how this methodology might be applied, the authors provide an example centered on a hypothetical China-Taiwan conflict.

Key Takeaways

  • Growth in scientific research on the causes of war and the drivers of conflict escalation provides a valuable resource to create scenarios that more accurately present the conditions that could create future crises or conflict.
  • The onset of conflict is deeply influenced by structural and proximate variables.
  • Some of the structural and proximate nonmilitary factors — such as the tendency toward the multilateralization of disputes, alliance building, and serial crises — carry important implications for military decisions.

Recommendations

  • Strengthening the nonmilitary factors in scenarios designed to support military decision-making could thus help improve the quality of military as well as political-strategic analysis.
  • More work will be required to translate the findings from the social sciences into formats that can be more easily used in defense planning processes and intelligence analysis.
  • Findings can be summarized and arranged in a systematic manner to more closely support the development of escalation templates.
  • Further research could help clarify how differing types of conflict scenarios involve specific structural and proximate factors.

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Heath, Timothy R. and Matthew Lane, Science-Based Scenario Design: A Proposed Method to Support Political-Strategic Analysis. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2019. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2833.html.
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This research was sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and conducted within the Cyber and Intelligence Policy Center of the RAND National Defense Research Institute (NDRI), a federally funded research and development center (FFRDC) sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense, the Joint Staff, the Unified Combatant Commands, the Navy, the Marine Corps, the defense agencies, and the defense Intelligence Community.

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