21st Century Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute (PKSOI) Papers - Known Unknowns: Unconventional "Strategic Shocks" in Defense Strategy Development

This timely PKSOI Paper on unconventional strategic shock provides the defense policy team a clear warning against excessive adherence to past defense and national security convention. Including the insights of a number of noted scholars on the subjects of "wild cards" and "strategic surprise," the author, Nathan Freier, argues that future disruptive, unconventional shocks are inevitable. Through strategic impact and potential for disruption and violence, defense-relevant unconventional shocks, in spite of their nonmilitary character, will demand the focused attention of defense leadership, as well as the decisive employment of defense capabilities in response. As a consequence, Mr. Freier makes a solid case for continued commitment by the Department of Defense to prudent strategic hedging against their potential occurrence.

The Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute and the Strategic Studies Institute are pleased to offer this insightful monograph as a contribution to the debate on this important national security issue.

The current defense team confronted a game-changing "strategic shock" in its first 8 months in office. The next team would be well-advised to expect the same. Defense-relevant strategic shocks jolt convention to such an extent that they force sudden, unanticipated change in the Department of Defense's (DoD) perceptions about threat, vulnerability, and strategic response. Their unanticipated onset forces the entire defense enterprise to reorient and restructure institutions, employ capabilities in unexpected ways, and confront challenges that are fundamentally different than those routinely considered in defense calculations.

The likeliest and most dangerous future shocks will be unconventional. They will not emerge from thunderbolt advances in an opponent's military capabilities. Rather, they will manifest themselves in ways far outside established defense convention. Most will be nonmilitary in origin and character, and not, by definition, defense-specific events conducive to the conventional employment of the DoD enterprise.

They will rise from an analytical no man's land separating well-considered, stock and trade defense contingencies and pure defense speculation. Their origin is most likely to be in irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid threats of "purpose" (emerging from hostile design) or threats of "context" (emerging in the absence of hostile purpose or design). Of the two, the latter is both the least understood and the most dangerous.