3

Development of Risk-Informed Strategies

Decision makers must often act with incomplete information—both for real-time, quick decisions to respond to crises as well as the slower paced (but no less important) development of a strategy that may involve future tactical decisions (Bentz 2022; Kurtz 2022; Vaddi et al. 2022). Both situations require a broad look at a variety of threats and outcomes weighed against resources, policies, and administration priorities.

During its information collection, the committee asked multiple agencies and individuals to identify opportunities for improvement in current U.S. government nuclear risk assessments and how this report might help address those gaps. Several themes emerged, including the following: the need for broader thinking to capture “the things not yet considered” as well as perspectives and input from U.S. allies and partners; a need for expanded adversarial intent modeling (e.g., “decision calculus”) and integrated intelligence collection efforts; the challenge of analyzing the risks of events that have not yet occurred (see Box 3-1); and, for risks associated with nuclear war in particular, the need for U.S. analysis to adapt to a rapidly changing deterrence environment. For this last item, it was noted that military and academic work on deterrence theory has not kept up with changes in deterrence, and that deterrence assessment by the Department of Defense (DoD) (and primarily the U.S. Strategic Command [USSTRATCOM]) alone is focused on DoD missions and objectives and does not capture wider U.S. government and policy objectives.¹ Additionally, several agency representatives who were asked supported the need for increased participation in nuclear war and nuclear terrorism related tabletop exercises by senior administration officials, resulting in better awareness of nuclear weapon choices, timelines, policies, processes, and capabilities.²

Finding 3-1: Decision makers from across the U.S. government highlight a need for nuclear war and nuclear terrorism risk analysis to have a broader scope. Decision makers are concerned about signals or threats that they may be missing that could lead to rare but highly consequential surprises. In addition, those within and outside of the Department of Defense (DoD), highlight a need for nuclear war risk analyses to be conducted outside of DoD to consider a broader scope of pathways and outcomes.

A key component of the committee’s tasking was to explore the interface between risk assessment and the development of strategy (Tasks 4 and 5; see Box 1-2). The committee heard from a variety of U.S. government decision and policy makers who were asked about how they utilize risk assessments related to nuclear war and nuclear terrorism, what methods they used to guide decisions, and the assumptions they made in developing nuclear security strategy for the United States. The information collected to examine this interface is shown in Tables 2-1 and 2-2, in the columns labeled “Strategy.” Table 2-1, “Risk Analysis Methods Used by Decision Makers to Assess Risks of Nuclear War,” shows that most rely on intelligence-informed leadership judgment to guide strategy decisions. Table 2-2, “Risk Analysis Methods Used by Decision Makers to Assess Risks of Nuclear Terrorism,” shows that intelligence-informed leadership judgment and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) risk methodology are used by some agencies and departments.

Decisions that rely on intelligence and leadership judgment can be made quickly and are well-suited to address real-time issues. However, they are susceptible to bias and group think (see the Phase I report section “Challenges to the Elicitation and Use of Expert Opinion” and the references therein [NASEM 2023a]), and often the number of experts is limited, so the scope of possible outcomes is also limited. These known decision-making biases can be mitigated by risk analysis.

More importantly, intelligence assessments characterize foreign threats and do not usually include the interactions with U.S. behavior or include vulnerabilities, probabilities, and consequences (Murphy 2022; Fullerton 2023; Leslie 2023). The U.S. government characterizes analysis of its adversaries and the threats they pose as “red” (i.e., as in “red teams” that are assigned the role of adversaries in exercises). Response to threats to minimize the impact of potential consequences or to reduce the likelihood of occurrence are characterized as “blue” (i.e., the blue teams).

During the Cold War, the United States relied primarily on nuclear weapons to deter foreign attack. In the current situation, foreign adversaries rely on nuclear weapons to deter U.S. attack. Thus, it is impossible to analyze risks of deterrence failure without also analyzing U.S. plans or likely choices in various situations (i.e., scenarios).³ By relying on intelligence information to guide decisions, officials may be overlooking a large component of risk that could offer a wider array of choices, options, and insight into outcomes that may otherwise not have been considered. The committee also heard that decision makers often consider the worst-case or most-likely scenarios when outlining possible decisions and actions to take to address a specific problem.

Conclusion 3-1: Intelligence-informed leadership judgment is a common approach used by decision makers to guide nuclear policy and decisions. Another is the use of “worst-case scenarios” or “most-likely scenarios” to guide decisions. These approaches contain assumptions that limit options to decision makers in the following ways:

1. Intelligence-informed leadership judgment assumes that the intelligence information provides sufficient context and information to inform decisions, but intelligence assessments are limited to assessing threats and decision making of adversaries. The intelligence assessments do not include interactions of adversaries with U.S. plans and choices nor, typically, the consequences of these interactions or vulnerabilities to the United States or its interests.
2. A worst-case or most-likely scenario approach assumes that the analysis of these limited cases is sufficient to guide decision making. Rather, consideration of a wider set (or sets) of possible scenarios potentially leads to a wider array of choices and options as well as a deeper understanding of the dependencies between pathways that lead to a variety of outcomes, increasing the chances of identifying rare but highly consequential events before they occur.

IMPLEMENTING INTEGRATED DETERRENCE

Integrated deterrence, as defined in Box 1-1, expands the scope of deterrence across domains, regions, types of conflict, and the U.S. government and its allies and partners. With this expanded scope, it is important to not

TABLE 3-1 Examples of Federal Agencies with Relevant Expertise or Authority

For deterrence strategy to become integrated across its multiple domains, an interagency integrator with access to federal agency capabilities is needed to make best use of the information and responsibilities across the government.⁴ Examples of groups formed by the President to address high-priority topics include interagency working groups (IWGs), presidential task forces, and ad hoc groups (i.e., tiger teams).⁵ The advantage of declared interagency efforts is that it signals the importance of an issue and its priority within an administration. It also outlines the organization of the group and allows outside expert participation (e.g., academia, university-affiliated research centers, think tanks, private sector, and industry) and access to federal agency capabilities and resources such as federal agency experts including parts of DoD, the Department of Energy National Laboratories, and other federally funded research and development organizations. A recent example is the effort that outlined the U.S. Strategy for Countering WMD and Securing Nuclear and Radiological Materials.

Conclusion 3-4: The 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy calls for a national strategy for integrated deterrence. Yet the capability to conduct an integrated deterrence risk analysis, structured to explore outcomes that could lead to the use of nuclear weapons (by the United States, its allies, or its adversaries), does not currently exist within the U.S. government. The establishment of such a risk analysis capability, following best practices and capturing expertise across U.S. government agencies, would support better-informed decisions and longer-term strategy development but will require time and investment to develop.

As a starting point for action to address this gap, existing interagency ad hoc groups could begin incorporating best-risk analysis practices outlined in Box 2-1 into a wider-scale and enduring capability. Current examples are tiger teams that were used to assess decision making leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as reported by the Washington Post and others.⁶ This capability would serve as a focal point for other interagency risk management proposals and efforts (even those not specifically asking for risk analysis).⁷ An early win could be an interagency effort to develop a set of possible scenarios leading to a variety of outcomes. Scenarios can be developed or modified to address immediate issues that arise, or they could be tailored for longer-term planning or be used as tabletop exercises.⁸ In the longer term, the capability would need to be codified with show of support and commitment by leadership through an Executive Order or similar means.

Several concepts that would contribute to establishing a risk analysis capability are listed in Box 3-1.

In addition, the committee identified a set of potential activities or actions that could expand the use of risk analysis to guide the implementation and management of integrated deterrence, especially as it relates to nuclear war. One option that could provide a focus on risks of nuclear weapons use in the context of integrated deterrence is to reinstate or re-create a similar function to the National Intelligence Officer for Warning. Yet another idea was to create an annual or biannual federally hosted workshop or meeting to share nuclear risk methods and results across the U.S. government. This could increase awareness of others working in the same space, encourage the sharing of capabilities, and/or improve integration.