Main point: The essays being summarized sought to “ponder the equally important ‘unknown unknowns’ and, insofar as this is possible, to characterize potential U.S. national security weaknesses and the threats most likely to blindside the U.S. and its allies…to make them ‘known unknowns,’ as it were.”
More about it:
- “…while the Chinese national security community studies the West, we have been notoriously lax in studying Chinese strategic history in any rigorous way beyond the most superficial studies of Sun Tzu.”
- “…while the Department of Defense takes seriously the threat of climate change, it relies on highly-conservative emissions-based models that do not prepare for especially dangerous scenarios that are more likely than the models can accommodate.”
- “…another highly-problematic flaw in the thinking of the Department of Defense: prioritizing the physical destruction of an opponent’s material at the expensive of the true object in war, which is convincing an enemy to change its mind in ways favorable to one’s own political objectives.”
- “…we do not correctly understand the limitations of fiction as a tool for preparing for the future. This tendency is especially evident in considering artificial intelligence, where limited fictional frames can have a negative effect on our capacity to consider all potential aspects of a strategic challenge.”
Why it matters: It’s important to address “cognitive challenges that prevent us from properly viewing and assessing troubling problems—the explicit and implicit models that shape our strategic thinking.”