Abstract
If there is one consensus among senior US officials and defense experts today, it is that the strategic environment confronting US defense policy is one of radical uncertainty. It is an environment with a dozen major potential threats, challenges, opportunities, and demand signals, arrayed in a complicated mosaic without clear implications for the size, structure, or technology of a modern military. It is a context of profound ambiguity whose future is less predictable than ever, in which events across the world are connected in denser and more explosive ways.
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Notes
U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review 2014 (Washington, DC: DoD, March 2014), 3.
Quoted in Michel Syrett and Marion Devine, Managing Uncertainty: Strategies for Surviving and Thriving in Turbulent Times (London: Economist Books, 2012), 3.
A leading example is Syrett and Devine, Managing Uncertainty. Nassim Nicholas Taleb approaches the challenge from a very different and useful perspective in Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder (New York: Random House, 2012). See also Yvan Allaire and Mibaela E. Firsirotu, “Coping with Strategic Uncertainty,” Sloan Management Review, Vol. 7 (Spring 1989), 7–16.
This concept is mentioned in Ian Goldin and Mike Mariathasan, The Butterfly Defect: How Globalization Creates Systemic Risks, and What to Do About It (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 54–55.
Richard Danzig, Driving in the Dark: Ten Propositions about Prediction and National Security (Washington, DC: Center for a New American Security, October 2011), 14–15. For a discussion of this distinction in relation to uncertainty-based policies, see Taleb, Antifragile, 4, 7, 9, 132–133.
Stephen Ward and Chris Chapman, “Transforming Project Risk Management into Project Uncertainty Management,” International Journal of Project Management, Vol. 21 (2003), 98–99.
See also Silvio Funtowicz and Jerome Ravetz, “Uncertainty, Complexity and Post-Normal Science,” Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, Vol. 13, No. 12 (1994), 1881–1885, and
T. J. Ross, J. M. Booker, and A. C. Montoya, “New Developments in Uncertainty Assessment and Uncertainty Management,” Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 40 (2013), 841–974.
Some sources indicate a more quantitative approach to “managing uncertainty,” built around assigning numerical values to as many uncertain variables as possible. See the discussion in J. M. Booker and T. J. Ross, “An Evolution of Uncertainty Assessment and Quantification,” Scientia Iranica, Vol. 18, No. 3 (2011), 669–676.
An example of such thinking is Paul K. Davis, “Uncertainty-Sensitive Planning,” in Stuart E. Johnson, Martin Libicki, and Gregory F. Treverton, eds., New Challenges, New Tools for Defense Decisionmaking (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, 2003), esp. 134–138.
Michael Fitzsimmons makes an argument for the continuing value of probabilistic situational analysis in national security planning in “The Problem of Uncertainty in Strategic Planning,” Survival, Vol. 48, No. 4 (2006), 131–146.
This mindset is closely related to what Jonathan Baron has described as “actively open-minded thinking,” which is a disposition that remains open to alternative explanations and hypotheses that differ from one’s favor explanation. See Baron, Thinking and Deciding, 4th ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 199–228.
An excellent source is John Kambhu, Scott Weidman, and Neel Krishnan, Rapporteurs, New Directions for Understanding Systemic Risk: A Report on a Conference Cosponsored by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2007), Chapter 3, “Systemic Risk in Ecology and Engineering.” Syrett and Devine argue for such principles as anticipation, agility, and resilience; see Managing Uncertainty, Chapters 2, 4 and 5.
James G. March, “Rationality, Foolishness, and Adaptive Intelligence,” Strategic Management Journal, Vol. 27 (2006), 201–214.
Joshua Cooper Ramo, The Age of the Unthinkable (New York: Little, Brown, 2009), 61.
Mary Douglas and Aaron Wildavsky, Risk and Culture: An Essay on the Selection of Technological and Environmental Dangers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 196.
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Mazarr, M.J. (2016). Managing Uncertainty. In: Rethinking Risk in National Security. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-91843-0_14
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